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THE NEW POLITICS 



BY J 

FRANK BUFFINGTON VROOMAN, 
B.Sc. (Oxon.), F.R.d.S. 

Author of Theodore Roosevelt, Dynamic Geographer 



OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

AMERICAN BRANCH 

35 WEST 3 znd STREET 

NEW YORK 






AV 



COPYRIGHT 191 1 BY 

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

AMERICAN BRANCH 



f)0 



(V 



TO ONE 

IN WHOM I HAVE FOUND 

THAT RAREST OF COMBINATIONS 

A DARING IMAGINATION AND A CONSERVATIVE JUDGMENT 

MY BROTHER 

CARL VROOMAN 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface 7 

Letter of Introduction 9 

Foreword 13 

Book I. The Philosophy of Ishmael 

I. Political Chaos 17 

II. Ethics and Individualism 27 

III. The Separation of Ethics from Economics 44 

IV. The Separation of Ethics from Politics 54 

V. The Rise of the Democracy of Individualism 65 

VI. Spirit of Jacobinism . . . 85 

Book II. The Philosophy of the Common Good 

I. Politics and Ethics 101 

II. The Greek Contribution to Politics 116 

III. Paternalism 137 

IV. Socialism 143 

V. The Individual and Political Environment 154 

VI. Foundations of Nationalism 173 

Book III. The Democracy of Nationalism 

I. The Old Issue 191 

II. Nationality and the Public Domain 202 

III. Nationality and Internal Improvements 211 

IV. Back to the People 226 

V. A Word about Sovereignty 245 

VI. The National Party 257 

VII. To Sum It Up 271 

Epilogue 283 



PREFACE 

The reader will observe that this volume is neither a 
treatise nor a collection of essays. The result of the 
leisure hours of many busy days, the author has decided 
to let it go forth with all its repetition of phrase and 
idea, which, while doing violence to his literary tastes, 
he hopes has not been overdone in his effort to emphasize 
a few fundamental principles. 

The author desires to acknowledge his obligations to 
his brothers, Rev. Hiram Vrooman (Author of "Religion 
Rationalized") and Mr. Carl S. Vrooman (Author of 
"American Railway Problems/' Oxford University 
Press, etc.), for their helpful criticisms; as well as to 
Professor Charles A. Beard (Columbia University). 
Perhaps here it will not be out of place, in behalf of 
his brother, the late Walter Vrooman, Founder of Rus- 
kin College, Oxford, for the author to extend to Profes- 
sor Beard for his assistance in that great movement 
those public acknowledgments of appreciation which 
his tragic and untimely death has made forever impos- 
sible. For of all the men Walter Vrooman gathered 
around himself at Oxford a dozen years ago, the writer 
personally knows, there was no one to whose zeal and 
abilities he attributed so much as to those of Professor 
Beard. 

Washington, D. C, July 4, 191 1. 



LETTER OF INTRODUCTION 

To Anglo-Saxon Youth : 

Young men and women of Great Britain and the 
United States, this century belongs to you. It will be 
what you make it. There is something fundamentally 
wrong in the civilization to which we were born. If 
you do not make it right it never will be righted, for 
something is being crystallized in the social melting pot 
and soon will be precipitated once for all — at least so 
far as this new world epoch is concerned upon which we 
are now entering. Your opportunity to-day is like the 
White Steed with hoofs of lightning in the Arab's fable. 
It will pass your way but once. 

If my observations have been to the point, they assure 
me that those of you, mostly, who have your ideals left — 
whom the "New Paganism" has passed over and left 
unscathed — are in little sympathy with that era of revo- 
lution and disintegration which is now coming to a close 
— the era of individualism — and which must come to a 
close if the British Empire and the American Republic 
are to endure — if the world-supremacy of the Anglo- 
Saxon is to be maintained. 

The question of national survival is offensive to the 
egotisms of our race. Commercial journalism and vaude- 
ville literature and candidates for office avoid it. But the 
survival of our nations on any terms recognizable to 
posterity as the states our fathers founded and died to 

9 



io LETTER OF INTRODUCTION 

found them so, depends upon the democracy of national- 
ism superseding the democracy of individualism, and 
whether your patriotism prompts you to give as much 
as your fathers gave. 

Are we not by this time sure — those of us who have 
dreamed that this world might be made a better place to 
live in — that the selfish instinct and brute force of the 
prehistoric man-beast on which our Politics and Eco- 
nomics are frankly founded, and in which are imbedded 
all democracies of individualism, are fundamentally and 
irretrievably wrong? Are we not to be more than wit- 
nesses of the passing of the civilization of the Ishmaelite 
and its sullen gospel of anarchy and rapine and strife? 

There is something the matter with the man who is 
satisfied with the world as it is and has been; who can- 
not see that too much of the whole life struggle of the 
human race has been given to the bare maintenance of 
physical existence ; a game for the vast majority hardly 
"worth the candle." Christian civilization cannot be said 
to have penetrated, to say nothing of having permeated, 
a system which requires of the vast majority of the 
human race that virtually all the conscious hours of life 
be given up for insufficient food and clothes and place 
to sleep. If labor is the sole reward of a life of unremit- 
ting toil; if over and above all this hangs the two-edged 
sword of Damocles in the certainty of no better and 
the uncertainty of as good; if phantoms of weakness, 
pauperism, disease, and death lie in ambush in the road 
ahead for myriads of your brothers and sisters and mine, 
young man and young woman, and if you are still satis- 
fied with the world as you find it, that which is distinctly 



LETTER OF INTRODUCTION n 

human — certainly every vestige of the divine — has been 
left out of your nature, and you would better close this 
book here, for you will never be able to understand it. 

Let us hope that we are at the beginning of a new era, 
for we are certainly at the end of an old one. There 
is a new spirit abroad. It is not merely reaction, nor 
reform. It is renaissance. Anglo-Saxon youth is wak- 
ing to new ideals, embracing a new chivalry, embarking 
on a new crusade. There is a new ideal and a new faith. 
Give these a chance. Science will take care of itself. 
The emphasis this moment belongs on Soul, not Things. 
With our transitional age rent wide open in the cata- 
clysms of readjustment — the spirit of man limping so 
far behind his advance in material achievement — who 
would not lose faith in that new all-sufficiency, that new 
infallibility called science? The spirit of man must 
master science or science will destroy the spirit of man. 
A generation ago we were afraid it would disprove Gene- 
sis and make atheists of us. There is a greater menace. 
Is it not making materialists, and will not this make 
atheists of us? The spirit of this age is openly and pro- 
fessedly pagan. Our ethics and economics and Politics 
are founded on interests, not principles. The spirit of 
the age is a spirit of open and unblushing self-aggran- 
dizement. This boasted twentieth century world of ours 
is a world of Things. The best elements of human life 
are being suffocated in Things. Our morale is so low 
that we have sought to achieve success by any means 
which could be made to appear legal, and have thought 
no shame of a business system based frankly on an 
illimitable greed ; or of a Politics on the same foundations 



12 LETTER OF INTRODUCTION 

without the fundamental consideration of right and 
wrong. 

What this century is to be depends on you. The future 
of the Anglo-Saxon race depends on what this century 
makes it. We cannot survive individualism. The 
future belongs to the organized races of mankind. Let 
us adopt a philosophy of life which will allow us to get 
together. We are all more or less lonesome. Let us 
have a social philosophy without socialism. Let us 
understand that more good may be wrought by working 
together for the same thing than by working against each 
other for the same thing. Let us know that if ever there 
is to be "peace on earth," there must first be "good 
will toward men." Let us entertain great ideals and 
seek great aims. We are no longer doers of great deeds. 
We are makers of great trades. Where once were heroes 
are money heaps, degeneracies and decay. Great deeds 
may be wrought again where luxury and idleness walk 
hand in hand to-day. The spirit of our fathers may 
return — the spirit which founded great nations, fought 
great battles, bequeathed great principles, recorded great 
deeds, registered great prayers. Where George Wash- 
ington carried the surveyor's compass through the path- 
less woods and started the advancing hosts of American 
conquerors over the Alleghanies, what have we to-day? 

Pittsburg ! 

Where the land is dim from tyranny- 
There tiny pleasures occupy the place 
Of glories, and of duties : as the feet 
Of fabled fairies when the sun goes down 
Trip o'er the ground where wrestlers strove by day. 

The Author. 



"Distinguished German philosophers who may acci- 
dentally cast a glance over these pages will superciliously 
shrug their shoulders at the meagerness and incomplete- 
ness of all that which I here offer. But they will be kind 
enough to bear in mind that the little which I say is 
expressed clearly and intelligently, whereas their own 
works, although very profound — unfathomably profound 
— very deep — stupenduously deep — are in the same de- 
gree unintelligible. Of what benefit to the people is the 
grain locked away in the granaries to which they have 
no key? The masses are famishing for knowledge and 
will thank me for the portion of intellectual bread, small 
though it be, which I honestly share with them. I believe 
it is not lack of ability that holds back the majority of 
German scholars from discussing religion and philosophy 
in proper language. I believe it is a fear of the results 
of their own studies which they dare not communicate 
to the masses. I do not share this fear, for I am not a 
learned scholar; I myself am of the people. I am not 
one of the seven hundred wise men of Germany. I 
stand with the great masses at the portals of their wis- 
dom. And if a truth slips through, and if this truth falls 
in my way, then I write it with pretty letters on paper, 
and give it to the compositor, who sets it in leaden type 
and gives it to the printer; the latter prints it and then 
it belongs to the whole world." — Heine, Religion and 
Philosophy. 

13 



BOOK I 
THE PHILOSOPHY OF ISHMAEL 



15 



CHAPTER I. 

POLITICAL CHAOS 

The chaos reigning over Anglo-Saxon Politics to- 
day is a pathetic commentary upon the vanity of all 
human hopes. We find everywhere democracy dis- 
credited and a disappointment, and liberalism bankrupt, 
and that after all the millennial dreams of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries. Everywhere we see simul- 
taneously, in the old world and the new, liberalism leap- 
ing with starving avidity upon the program of socialism, 
with no justification in logic and with no excuse but 
its own sterility and emptiness. In England it is Cob- 
denism, which represents the democracy of individual- 
ism and laissez jaire, abandoning the principles which 
once made it a rationally consistent (for it never was 
a consistently rational) political creed, for a program of 
socialistic opportunism. The only difference between 
British Liberalism and its present tendencies, and British 
socialism and its present status, is that socialism is built 
in the foundations of principles consistent with its 
articles, whereas modern liberalism issues a propaganda 
whose articles are founded on the principles of neither 
individualism nor socialism. This political melange is 
a sorry commentary on the intelligence, or on the sin- 
cerity, of modern British liberal statesmen. 

In the United States it is the self-styled JefTersonian 
democrats who, in the very moment of shouting for the 
Declaration of Independence (which they still consider, 

17 



18 THE NEW POLITICS 

by the way, a political issue), abandon every principle of 
the individualism which gave it birth and clamor for an 
extension of national government to a degree even un- 
dreamed of by Alexander Hamilton — extending Jeffer- 
son's theory of a national government, which he de- 
clared must be a department for foreign affairs only, 
to the extent of government ownership of railroads. 
Whether this is a puerile abandonment of every vestige 
of political theory, and every safeguard of political 
principle, or a shameless opportunist appeal to catch the 
popular vote, it is, in either case, a pathetic spectacle and 
illustrates the inadequacy of individualism as a working 
theory of life. How rapidly the world is drifting away 
from the theories of Rousseau, that organization is a 
blunder and civilization a crime, and of Adam Smith, of 
the essential harmony of discord, may be seen by the way 
the loudest professors of these doctrines are turning to 
socialism. 

Anglo-Saxon Politics is opportunist and destitute of 
a guiding principle. Starting off over a hundred years 
ago with the negative idea that we should keep just as 
near anarchy as possible and still have an excuse for a 
government, we, the American contingent, have blun- 
dered along making such headway as was necessary to 
a race which blind luck had given the best chances in 
the history of humanity; making such progress as we 
could not well avoid because of our geographical and 
economic position. 

Neither England nor America enjoys the luxury of 
solitude in its political confusions. The whole Anglo- 
Saxon world presents a political chaos, in which all 



POLITICAL CHAOS 19 

parties are indiscriminately mixed ; devoid of any funda- 
mental line of cleavage and innocent of the very sus- 
picion of a first principle. 

We are brought to face the indisputable fact that 
laissez faire liberalism is inadequate to the necessities of 
twentieth century politics, or to any national life in its 
foreign relations or its domestic concerns. 

If there is to be an Anglo-Saxon hereafter, the day has 
come for something more than the political opportunist. 
We must understand that the party boss is a traitor to 
his country, and that there is just now no treason more 
worthy dire and summary doom than the selfish program 
of the individualist. 

I challenge the pretensions of the modern individualist, 
Republican or Democrat : the laissez faire liberal whose 
latitudinarianism is sufficiently spacious to engulf a 
socialistic program. I challenge his right to political 
leadership on the ground that he himself does not know 
where he stands; that there is fundamental and irre- 
mediable antagonism between his policies and his politics ; 
that his inherent and opportunist ideas, the best of which 
are without root in any rational system, have been sown 
into such a jungle of political undergrowth as to unfit 
him for serious leadership in any national or imperial 
crisis. 

Politically, the Anglo-Saxon peoples have instinctively 
felt where they could not see their way. They have 
groped blindly toward a saner future, toward a juster 
social environment, and, to a limited extent, have actually 
incorporated into their national institutions certain great 
principles which they have not yet recognized as such. 



20 THE NEW POLITICS 

We have made one great blunder, and that is, in the 
assumption that the world of politics is a chance world 
and not built in law and order; that it is a laissez faire 
world over which is written, "Abandon reason all ye 
who enter here." 

There is no political science in America far separated 
from the science of demagogy — of manipulating shib- 
boleths and newspapers, and controlling those forces 
which control public opinion — which fills public office 
with men and clothes men with power, and too often 
prostitutes power to tyranny. 

We have come to a point in the history of the United 
States when we can foresee the destruction of our lib- 
erties. The failure of the democracy of individualism is 
registered in the multibillionaire. 

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere cansas" quoth 
Virgil. 

The time has come for some fundamental thinking. 
We must go straight back to first principles and reex- 
amine and restate our political creed. 

Frankly, we are getting tired of laissez faire — the 
Ishmaelite theory of a free scramble with every man's 
hand against his brother. We may see all over the civil- 
ized world to-day a drift away from the individualism 
and anarchy of the eighteenth century — a movement in 
every realm of human thought and action toward 
coordination, combination, organization, socialization. 
There is a danger that this movement may proceed too 
far. In politics this would plunge us into socialism. The 
world is growing weary of individualism and lonely in 
its unsocial life and thought. It is quite certain we are 



POLITICAL CHAOS 21 

through with the revolutionary ideas of the eighteenth 
century. It is not at all certain we will not go to the 
other extreme. We have seen in the nineteenth century 
the movement away from laissez faire and toward 
nationality in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Great 
Britain, and United States. But there is another world- 
movement alongside it, and that is socialism. 

In the Anglo-Saxon world the reaction from individ- 
ualism is toward socialism. 

The question arises, can we not find a middle ground 
common to what is true in both these antithetic systems, 
excluding, as far as possible, what is false in both, in 
what might be called the democracy of nationalism — a 
nationalism which is really democratic, and which is at 
the same time rational, ethical, and efficient, a national- 
ism based on the idea that the state has an ethical foun- 
dation and a moral mission? That the state is a mere 
contraption devised for the protection of "vested 
interests" ; for securing a laissez faire competition to 
guarantee a free field in which the strong and cunning 
prey upon the weak is a conception which is losing its 
hold upon the humaner elements of mankind. 

The American people need a reexamination of their 
political faith, a realignment of political parties. There 
is no evidence that our "statesmen" will essay this task. 
Has not the time come for some one at least to raise the 
question? Is it not time to strike a new note, to insist 
upon finding a fundamental political idea, to discover an 
elemental line of cleavage, if there be such, between the 
two great political parties? Is there anywhere ground 
for hope of a realignment of parties along the line of 



22 THE NEW POLITICS 

cleavage, which appears more or less distinctly from the 
beginning of American Politics to the present day; of 
abandoning the selfish and whimsical opportunism which 
constitutes the center and circumference of American 
political life and building toward a sound and rational 
future, toward an ethical and constructive democracy, 
on the basis of a few principles whose value has been 
amply demonstrated in a century and a third of our 
national existence ? Shall we have a political philosophy 
in this country? If so shall it be also an ethical 
philosophy? Is there enough moral fiber among us to 
shift the foundations of American Politics from interests 
to principles? Are we capable of rising above the plane 
of profit and loss? Are we completely besotted in our 
selfishness, or have we sufficient intelligence to serve as 
a clearing house for first principles ? Dare we hope that 
the riot and anarchy of self-interest, the void of reason 
and ethic which prevails in our political machines, plat- 
forms, speeches, and bosses shall give way to a succinct 
challenge of principles under which issues will take care 
of themselves ? 

Shall we meet the twentieth century issue squarely in 
the approaching titanic struggle between the democracy 
of individualism and the democracy of ethical and con- 
structive statecraft? 

The first thing we want is our fundamental idea. For 
behind political policies is — or ought to be — a rational 
Politics. And behind a theory of political association 
is a theory of life. And the fundamental fault in 
American Politics is the American theory of life, and 
that theory of life is egoism, individualism, breaking 



POLITICAL CHAOS 23 

out now as commercialism, now as financialism — - 
always materialism. 

We have played all the variations on freedom and 
equality, individual liberty, natural rights. These have 
become the undisputed theoretical possession of man- 
kind. We want a new motif. That motif is the common 
good. 

We have laid claim to all our rights and some of us 
to more. Who wants to name his duties? We have 
harped on the phrases of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence until the harp is out of tune. We must turn to 
the purposive, ethical mission named in the preamble to 
the Constitution "To promote the general welfare." 

The task of the statesman of the twentieth century 
is to protest without calculation against the hell of indi- 
vidualism; to create a rational theory of political asso- 
ciation on American and real democratic foundations, 
drag it up from the turmoil of conflict, give it ethical 
motive and rational form, and breathe into it a spirit 
which shall lift it to the level of a patriotism. 

Our task is to discover the principles underlying our 
great movements, the unclassified upward struggles of 
a mighty people; to be able intelligently to guide the 
rebound of political theory and practical statecraft in the 
present and unmistakable reaction from the extreme of 
individualism to the extreme of socialism. To crush 
anarchy and prevent socialism; to hew the highway 
straight for the middle way ; to direct the development oi 
American Politics on safe and yet human lines — this is 
our task. 

The best way of framing a rational Politics is to begin 



24 THE NEW POLITICS 

by reading history backward. If we have a nation, a 
national life, and a national idea, national institutions 
worth preserving or worth improving, no one will deny 
the right of search for those principles which have made 
us a nation instead of a bunch of feeble and warring 
States. It is no more difficult to trace the history of an 
organic and rational Union back to the atomism of Con- 
federation and State Rights than to trace a rational and 
orderly universe back to the fire mist. From such a proc- 
ess we may do more than draw seemly conclusions. We 
may discover laws and principles, and they always 
lie alongside law and principle. As in physics or 
astronomy, so in politics. It is scarcely sufficient that 
each expanding bosom solemnly announce as law such 
theories as seem to him good. As to first principles in 
politics, history leaves the only unimpeachable testi- 
monies. For after all, there is some truth in Freeman's 
favorite phrase that history is past politics and politics 
is present history. 

Is there not some abiding principle somewhere out- 
side individualism and socialism — outside unorganized or 
organized selfish instinct — by which we can regulate our 
political life, and which will offer a rationale for human 
existence and present the basis of an environment where 
the spirit may live and man may grow ? 

De Tocqueville pointed out over two generations ago 
that the progress of democracy meant the final annihila- 
tion of those ties which held together the old regime; 
and that anarchy would follow the disintegrating process. 
This is exactly what has happened, for perhaps in 
America more than in any other country where democ- 



POLITICAL CHAOS 25 

racy has gained headway, the principles which brought 
democracy into being have issued through laissez faire 
into a free-for-all race with no recognition of the prin- 
ciples of handicap, in which industrially, commercially, 
and financially, competition has at last destroyed or is 
destroying itself. The principle as a working theory of 
life was beneficial to a certain epoch with certain con- 
ditions intolerable because things were so bad that any- 
thing which would destroy would benefit. After its 
revolutionary work was done, it became a denial of law 
and order and the rationale of law and order, except as 
law and order were considered as a very crude protec- 
tion of the individual against violence aimed at his person 
or property. It was not to the interest of the exploiter, 
the financier, the politician (in the American sense and 
spelled with a small "p") to have the weak protected 
or to have the devious methods of cunning subject to 
the state control. 

Thus democracy arose in individualism, and individ- 
ualism in anarchy, and anarchy is protest against human 
government. The democracy of individualism arose 
when anarchy compromised with such government as 
was considered a necessary evil and would protect life 
and property from overt physical force, leaving wide 
open all the approaches to cunning, exploitation, and 
chicanery. Here is where the experiment of the democ- 
racy of individualism has failed in every European 
country, and where in the Western Hemisphere it stands 
to-day discredited and a disappointment. This is why, 
the world over to-day, liberalism is bankrupt. 

Out of the existing confusions of prevailing atomism 



26 THE NEW POLITICS 

which nowhere contain the potency of an ethical state, 
certain new elements appear, both ethical and rational, 
which give the promise of an adequate environment for 
that mighty organism of humanity, which shall some 
day do no violence to the thought of God. 

The individualism of the eighteenth century has been 
weighed and found wanting. Our ethical Hedonism is 
an inadequate foundation for a rational state. 

Professor Butcher says that the Epicurean theory of 
the state, an association for the protection of rights and 
nothing more, "gained acceptance in the decline of Greek 
life and was itself a symptom of decline," and Lecky 
says of it, that it has "proved little more than a principle 
of disintegration or an apology for vice." "Anarchy 
is the creed of unreason in Politics," says the late Pro- 
fessor Ritchie, "and is a political philosophy only in the 
sense in which absolute scepticism may be called a meta- 
physical system." (Natural Rights, Pref.) 

The story is told of the boyhood of Epicurus, that, 
with his teacher, he was reading the lines of Hesiod : 

Hrot, fiev TtpuiTiaa Xao$ yever^ aurap siteira 
Tai supucrepvos 7cavzcuv edo$ a<?<paXe$ aiec 
AOavarwv 

"Eldest of beings, Chaos first arose, 
Thence Earth wide stretched, the steadfast seat of all 
The Immortals." 

The inquisitive youth at once asked his preceptor, 
"And Chaos whence?" 
Whence Chaos? 
From Epicurus I should say. 



CHAPTER II 

ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 

There is naught in these pages intelligible to any man 
with whom it is not agreed at the outset that nothing 
human can be settled apart from the ethical con- 
sideration. 

The problems of politics will be held as unsolvable 
without going back to the everlasting questions of right 
and wrong and rationality. By reason of their essential 
nature, they invade those chaotic voids which individual- 
ism has bereft of law and order and where a state of 
anarchy has left free play for an unbridled scramble for 
the wealth, place, and power of the world; where the 
greeds and hatreds of men masquerade under the 
unctuous catchwords of Jacobinism: "freedom of con- 
tract," "free trade," "free competition," "individual ini- 
tiative," laissez faire, etc. These phrases once had a 
meaning. But they no longer even cloak the hypocrisy 
and greed they once tried to expose. 

What we want to-day is an ethical theory of politics 
based on an ethical theory of life. 

If we agree to agree so far with Kant that the only 
unconditioned good in the universe is the element of good 
will, we must abandon at once the whole theory of in- 
dividualism, that "free competition" where the big eat 
the little, and both the politics and economics which are 
the conclusions of a philosophy of life which justifies 
a man's selfishness to himself. 

27 



28 THE NEW POLITICS 

But the ethical form is not enough. Art and Science 
are powerless to accouche the new age because the ethi- 
cal objective is incomplete without its spring and motive 
force, the ethical subjective. No benign future lies 
over the sensuous hills of color and form, and there is 
no "surcease of sorrow" from "man's inhumanity to 
man," without the vital fountain of all rational human 
conduct, the ethical motive of good will. 

Our ground ideas must not only provide an answer 
which shall say why a soldier will rush to death in 
battle for his country or why men toil without hope 
of reward, that life may be sweeter for those still unborn, 
but they must somewhere unfold a faith puissant and 
adequate to kindle patriotic fires and inspire the spirit 
of political heroism once more. We must find that 
which not only accounts for nobility of life, but which 
calls it forth. Any political theory neglecting this element 
is false or faulty because Politics looks forward as well as 
backward, and considers the ought as well as the fact. 

If we are to solve our political problems, we must 
first know what is the matter with us. The matter with 
us is that our theory of life dominates our politics and 
economics and our theory of life is a slightly modified 
Epicurean Hedonism, egoism, atomism, anarchy. 

The most of us are too old in heart if not too old in 
years to face the present economic anarchy with an 
ethical ideal and a principle and a point of view. Shall 
the present "moral wave" sweep over this country, then 
blow out a stop cock and escape in hissing steam? Is 
it any more than a craze? Will it last longer and accom- 
plish more than our mad, national enthusiasm for 



ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 29 

Trilby's foot or Teddy's bear? We Americans are 
mercurial. We do not hold form or heat. Just now 
we are very angry because we have been buncoed by a 
set of financiers whom a little while ago we worshiped 
as certain gilt deities of a new order of Golden Rule. 
Now we, the American people, do not like to be buncoed. 
In our indignation we resort at once to writing a few 
articles and making a few speeches. Then when we 
have blown our blast — lawyers, preachers, journalists, 
artists, professors, stockholders and hired men among 
us — we step cheerfully into the procession again and 
stand in line with an open and irritated palm behind our 
back and without batting an eye, take our tip like a head 
waiter. 

Let it be made as clear as possible just here that no 
one in these days but the professional anarchist lays 
claim to the theory of pure individualism. Those who 
classify themselves under this category profess to believe 
in a highly modified article, and there are as many modi- 
fications as there are individualists. It is plain that any 
attempt to define them all would lead to an unending 
confusion. I beg to refer at once, therefore, to the some- 
what brief and inadequate definition of individualism in 
Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology. 

"Individualism is: 

"(1) Regard for exclusive or excessive self-interest. 

"(2) The doctrine that the pursuit of self-interest and 
the exercise of individual initiative should be little or not 
at all restrained by the state and that the function of 
government should be reduced to the lowest possible 
terms" 



3 o THE NEW POLITICS 

The definition goes on to state that in ethics the term 
is applied to those theories deriving the moral ideal or 
standard from the individual man. I hope, however, the 
contention will be considered fair for the purposes of 
this argument that individualism must be considered as 
a system of thought — a philosophy of life — which must 
stand or fall as a system and not as modified by tenets i 
antagonistic to its main thesis. Nevertheless, it may be 
remembered that we have here a definition of not a pure 
individualism but a nineteenth century article; one so 
modified by the experience of men since the revolutions 
of the eighteenth century as to distinguish it from pure 
anarchy. As Professor Hibben of Princeton has clearly 
stated it: "The theory of individualism in its extreme 
form leads to anarchy, which is the reduction of govern- 
mental functions to zero." 

He further describes such an antithesis as is here 
under discussion as "Social atomism opposed to the 
social organism." 

I fancy there are some things in which we are all 
better, and some in which we are all worse, than our 
creeds. But the plain uncorrupted and unmodified theory 
of the democracy of individualism presents that idea of 
the state which is simply the apotheosis of the policeman. 
This constitutes the "business theory of the state." 
Beyond the area of the "beat" and the authority of the 
"baton" this theory says "every man for himself." The 
weak perish and the cunning and the strong survive. Be- 
cause the strong and cunning win, they ought to win. This 
is the essence of the ethics of individualism. Whatever 
there is that is admirable, or indeed ethical, in the teach- 



ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 31 

ings of the democracy of individualism, is where it has 
departed from the individualistic motive, which is the 
selfish instinct, and where it has introduced juster and 
saner relations, in other words, more rational and social 
relations, among mankind in opposition to the funda- 
mental principles of its creed. 

The plain, brutal truth is that our politics are founded 
on interests, not principles. 

Here we are fundamentally wrong — I mean ethically 
wrong. The criticism of Lord Salisbury (Oxford 
Essays, 1858) in reference to British Politics is equally 
applicable to our own. "No one acts on principles or 
reasons from them." This is a serious indictment, and 
it may be applied to Anglo-Saxon Politics since the 
century of individualism and revolution. 

Instead, we have, for the most part, the tragedy of 
the frank avowal of a life philosophy which faces the 
universe and attempts its riddles upon the simple propo- 
sition: "What is there in it for me?" We have ex- 
posed the age we live in to a criticism as old as Plato's 
restrictions on Antisthenes and the Cynics who 
ignored all they could not "grasp with teeth and 
hands." 

It is a sorry coincidence that our national life had its 
beginning in that era which, more than any other era of 
recorded history, was fullest of the disintegrating phi- 
losophy which was revolt against rationality, govern- 
ment, architectonic statecraft. If, later, we turned our- 
selves to constructive state-building it was only because 
the wiser men among the fathers found that' Jacobinism 
offered no rational foundation for an enduring state; 



32 THE NEW POLITICS 

and thus one was made out of thirteen — surely an un- 
lucky number. 

Thus it came that this "business theory of the state" 
of ours, based on the Epicurean ethics and theory of life, 
is that into which our new American nation was born, 
and, as it were, baptized. At bottom we are still 
Hedonists in morals and atomists in politics. A serious 
survey of the sordid and pathetic spectacle of American 
Politics — a calm perusal of the selfish and unintelligent 
story of American political history — will not justify the 
Fourth of July orations which have been emptied upon 
them, nor the American Jacobinism which is here dis- 
closed. 

The ethics of individualism has magnified the acquisi- 
tive instinct. It is the system which, in justifying a 
man's selfishness to himself, has carried on the work of 
the disintegration of society and of our political institu- 
tions until our whole contribution of modern democracy 
lias been framed with reference to the success and per- 
petuation of the acquisitive instinct. A political system 
founded on interests, not principles, can meet with no 
other fate. An economic system framed in the interests 
of "economic man" which (one cannot say who) is simply 
a covetous machine, can reach no other conclusions than 
to present us with one man who owns or controls one- 
eleventh of all the wealth of the richest nation the 
world has ever seen. How soon will he control it 
all? 

The narrow Hedonists to whom we owe our ground 
idea in ethics, economics, and politics, framed a string 
of notions so congenial to the immature and unregen- 



ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 33 

erate soul of man that they have been followed more 
joyously, and their teachings lived up to more piously, 
than any other ethical system devised by man. It is so 
simple. There is but one ethical motive — appetite. All 
endeavor is prompted by appetite. The desire for selfish 
gratification is the fount from which all blessings flow. 
There is but one standard of judgment — the selfish 
opinion of an egoist. There is one mainspring of action 
— the desire for one's own selfish gratification. "What- 
soever," quoth Hobbes in Leviathan, "is the object of 
any man's appetite or desire, that it is which he for his 
part calleth good, and the object of his hate and aversion, 
evil." My pleasure is my summitm bonum, and as I 
am the only judge of what I want, I am the only judge 
of my chief good. Thus Hobbes, and his disciples, 
Locke, Rousseau, and all other Epicureans and Utili- 
tarian atomists and materialists before and since his day. 

This is the prevailing Anglo-Saxon theory of ethics. 
This is the foundation of our politics, and economics, 
and much of our religion. This is the simple ethics of 
individualism. 

The individualism of to-day is different from what it 
was in the first crude and barbarous ebullition of its 
youth simply and solely because men found they could 
not hold society together and lead the lives of human 
beings while allowing the selfish instincts of the strong 
and cunning to run rampant and uncontrolled by society. 
Adam Smith's contention that the good of all would some- 
how follow the selfish antagonism of each, soon found 
itself enveloped in a halo of interrogation points in the 
factory legislation and the great masses of other acts 



34 THE NEW POLITICS 

passed since his day, every one of which has flatly denied 
his fundamental thesis. 

Eighteenth century individualism offered no other 
standard of action than acquiring profit and escaping 
harm. It became the principle of the political philosophy 
of the French and English-speaking peoples, and has 
dominated them for a hundred and fifty years. Hobbes's 
theory of the reduction of all the activities of the human 
will to self-preservation and self-indulgence, in other 
words, to a modern Epicureanism, became the philo- 
sophical foundation of those forces of individualism 
which dominate whatever of political theory we have 
in America, showing itself in the "business theory of 
state." 

One need not look far to see how the creed of Ben- 
tham, that benevolence must give way to self-interest ; of 
James Mill, that there is no place in a theory of society 
for a moral sense; of Malthus, who opposed brute instinct 
to benevolence as the foundation of ethics and of the busi- 
ness and social order; of the Manchester school, which 
brooked no legislative control of industrial-commercial 
ravening more than maniacal — demoniacal — how these 
and other such monstrous beliefs prevailing in a world 
nominally Christian and really individualistic, have domi- 
nated nineteenth century civilization, and to this day. 
If the French Revolution was the offspring of 
individualism, no less was the commercial and industrial 
anarchy of England, which has so much to answer for in 
dies irce, for every hollow-eyed child of the tens of 
thousands of unhappy children whose very flesh and bones 
were woven into the cotton fabrics of Manchester and 



ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 35 

Birmingham, whose souls were transformed by the 
alchemy of individualism into the golden foundations of 
England's wealth. 

Bentham and James Mill, indeed the whole early school 
of laissez faire economists and Radicals, preached a 
simple way to the millennium. All that kept humanity 
from achieving it were aristocratic rule and monarchic 
government. Sweep these away and place the manu- 
facturer and millionaire tradesman in the place of king 
and noble, and labor would be protected and mankind 
would come to its own. The middle classes would guar- 
antee the lower classes in their rights. The younger Mill, 
seeing the miserable failure of these crude dreams, lost 
much of his early faith in democracy; i. e., the democracy 
of individualism which he grew to look upon as the 
misrule of mediocrity which would crowd the higher 
virtues of mankind to the wall, enslaved by an insidious 
despotism. A dead weight of democratic conservatism, 
massed and bound in its own inertia, would, because of 
its own incapacity for framing a rational program, set 
itself across the path of progress and keep the status 
quo by a policy of veto. 

It is greatly to the credit of Mill that his defense of 
utilitarianism has done more to undermine the system 
than any other book written in his century. If he 
accepted Bentham's doctrine of pleasure and pain he 
transmitted the dogma through his own superb character 
into something totally different from what Bentham 
actually taught. In a nutshell, Mill taught that happiness 
is the result of goodness ; therefore, the love of pleasure 
is the love of virtue; and, therefore, the pursuit of virtue 



36 THE NEW POLITICS 

is the pursuit of pleasure. But Mill, with all his powers 
of argument, has not been able to make real morality 
subservient to Hedonism. A system must be judged by 
its effect upon the masses of mankind and disinterested 
acts of self-sacrifice will never be done by the masses 
"for the fun of it." To say that the patriot immolates 
himself on the altar of his country because it is a pleasure 
to him is to beg the question. It is to deny the existence 
of a disinterested motive. It might be admitted that 
Florence Nightingale or Clara Barton found more pleas- 
ure in ministering to human suffering than in a life de- 
voted to the game, e. g., of social precedence. But 
unfortunately the majority of the human race is not 
constituted that way. Therefore, the doctrine of pleas- 
ure and pain — utilitarianism — does not mean the same 
to them. This doctrine means to the masses of mankind 
that pleasure is self-indulgence, and, to the masses of 
mankind under utilitarianism, self-indulgence is erected 
into a moral principle. But this is assuredly and openly 
admitted by the classical economists whose millennium 
lies in the direction of each individual pursuing his own 
pleasure; i. e., the masses of mankind following blind, 
selfish instincts instead of adopting an architectonic 
rational ethical idea which they may erect into a great 
institution called a state. 

The crucial point at which the ethics of individual- 
ism fails is in not distinguishing between pleasure and 
the object of an action, or perhaps going further and 
identifying pleasure with the object of all action and 
affection. This reduces the motive of ethics to selfish- 
ness. This Hedonism falls down because it takes no 



ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 37 

account of a disinterested affection or action. There is 
no distinction between the object of an action and the 
pleasure which accompanies the exercise of that action 
or affection. A man loves his country. He goes into 
battle and gets himself shot because it gives pleasure to 
a patriot to get himself shot. A man loves his son. He 
does things for his son because it gives the father pleas- 
ure. But this is no adequate account of patriotic or 
paternal love. Neither a home nor a nation can be 
built upon it. American Politics needs a new patriotism 
and patriotism is not possible under a strict individualist 
theory of life. 

Mill cut away the last prop from the tottering utili- 
tarianism in which he was nurtured in his essay on 
Bentham. After a searching criticism of Bentham's 
theory of life (which is the first question to raise, he 
claims, in regard to any man of speculation) he shows 
how little it can do for the individual. Then he shows 
how much less it can do for society. It will do nothing 
for the spiritual interests of society ("except sometimes 
as an instrument in the hands of some higher doctrine"). 
"That which alone causes any material interests to exist, 
which alone enables any body of human beings to exist 
as a society, is national character ; that it is which causes 
a nation to succeed in what it attempts, another to fail ; 
one nation to understand and aspire to elevated things, 
another to grovel in mean ones ; which makes the great- 
ness of one nation lasting and dooms another to early 
and rapid decay." 

Bentham made the mistake "of supposing that the 
business part of human affairs was the whole of them; 



38 THE NEW POLITICS 

all at least that the legislator and moralist had to do 
with." 

Again, "a philosophy of laws and institutions not 
founded on a philosophy of national character is an 
absurdity. 3 ' 

Mill's statement is irrefutably true. It is where the 
whole school of philosophic radicals and orthodox 
economists miserably failed in being unequal to framing 
a theory of politics or economics on any but the founda- 
tions of materialism. Their fault was fundamental. 
Their theory of life was wrong. It nowhere contained 
the elements necessary to a sound philosophy of national 
character. It was incapable of supporting a rational 
theory of national character because it held no rational 
theory of individual character. The theory was un- 
social. It predicated of the state — of society — of 
humanity, so many human units in a state of war. It 
denied the element of good will. Each man was trying 
to get the most pleasure and escape the most pain. 
This theory of life, in short, was what Hobson calls "the 
protean fallacy of individualism, which feigns the exist- 
ence of separate individuals by abstracting and neglect- 
ing the social relations which belong to them and make 
them what they are." 

Mill's growth is all the more interesting in that the 
Anglo-Saxon world has not kept up with it. We are 
still as a race groveling in the lairs of individualism 
which this man grew up in and grew out of. 

Woodrow Wilson has said in a recent thought- 
ful address before the National Bar Association, "The 
whole history of liberty has been a struggle for the 



ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 39 

recognition of rights not only, but for the embodiment 
of rights in law, in courts and magistrates and 
assemblies." 

This is an exact statement of the modern highest type 
of much modified individualism. Where the nationalist 
will take academic issue with him is in that he neglects 
entirely the element of reciprocity. It is always and only 
"rights." The nationalist would say, "The whole history 
of freedom has been a struggle for a recognition of rights 
not only, but an assertion of duties, and the embodiment 
of obligations as well as rights of both man and nation, 
in law, in courts and magistrates and assemblies." 

This is a statement of nationalism, the old and the 
new. 

It is here that individualism fails. It neglects the 
principle of reciprocity, which is the soul of sociality. 
It offers a declaration of rights and no duties, and we 
cannot avoid the conclusion of Thomas Hill Green that 
"all rights are relative to moral ends or duties." 

This system declares for all rights and no duties, and 
sets up boundaries between individuals through which 
the gates swing but one way. When the element of 
duties enters it means simply that what the individual 
does not wish to be done to himself he must not do to 
others. The principle of ethical democracy enters in the 
voluntary aspect of reciprocity, that the reciprocal law is 
not imposed from without but from within. Thus we 
may see that a philosophy of rights and duties, or reci- 
procity, is simply a realization (if only in the ideal) 
of the Golden Rule. 



40 THE NEW POLITICS 

The soul of the democracy of altruism is reciprocity — ■■ 
the Golden Rule. Individualism is based on the phi- 
losophy of life, which is a search after happiness without 
obligations, and this theory of rights, stated by individ- 
ualism, means every time, under analysis, brute suprem- 
acy, and, behind it, the sanction of might. 

The weak perish; the strong win. 1 

Individualism, therefore, is the bulwark of the con- 
tention that Might is Right. Starting with the proposi- 
tion in politics which, in economics, Adam Smith, and 
the other economists have preached to the business 
world for a hundred years, Hobbes claimed that the 
selfishness of many conduces to the happiness of all, 
inasmuch as the state is a machine for purposes of 
realizing enlightened selfishness. "Two conceptions," 
says Arnold Toynbee, "are woven into every argument 
of the Wealth of Nations, the belief in the supreme value 
of individual liberty, and conviction that Man's self-love 
is God's providence, that the individual in pursuing his 
own interest is promoting the welfare of all." It is easy 
to see that, if under a political or economic mechanism, 
selfishness works toward good, selfishness becomes a 
moral principle and makes Might Right. 

But then this is the theory of hisses faire — free and 
unlimited competition, where the strong or the cunning 

1 On the night of the Fourth of August, 1789, Feudalism was abolished in 
France. On that night " Malouet, from an inspiration which will do honor to his 
memory, had adjured his colleagues to take into consideration the lot of laboring 
classes, to open bureaux of charity, to establish workshops for labor. A low noise 
arose: they passed on. . . . Camus wished then to add a declaration of duties 
to a declaration of rights. The proposition was rejected, and Mirabeau wrote 
that there were ' quibblings there unworthy a political assembly.' What. 
Mirabeau called a quibble was a revolution. 

" Thus the two doctrines began to separate." 

(Louis Blanc, French Revolution, vol. i, p. 582.) 



ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 41 

win. For if they win it is on the principle that each 
acts for his own interest, and that the resultant is the 
aggregate of individual good, there being no common 
good. So that Thomas Hill Green's caustic criticism of 
the theory of Hobbes (Principles of Political Obligation, 
p. 370, par. 47) is unanswerable: "Where there is no 
recognition of a common good there can be no right in 
any other sense than power." 

It is the doctrine we are accustomed to under the 
regime of individualism, in the absence of ethics, or 
the possibility of ethics, under free trade laissez faire, 
where the weak perish and the strong or cunning win, 
where the selfishness of the many is the good of the all. 
This fundamental and false foundation of the democracy 
of individualism makes two things necessary — that 
Might makes right and that Progress is fortuitous and 
not rational. 

I say that this apotheosis of unrestrained and irre- 
sponsible greed called individualism, and which, reduced 
to its lowest terms, presents self-seeking as the sole 
object of the human will, is the negation of all ethics and 
all religions, and is not the motive, nor does it lie in 
the direction of the highest development of the human 
race. 

That theory of life called individualism, which has 
ruled with scarcely a shadow of turning the life history 
of this planet for a myriad of centuries before there ever 
came a creature who could frame a theory of life, is 
only too palpably insufficient for a modern state, in its 
ideal, its motive, and its point of view. 

Its ideal is that each particular organism confined to 



42 THE NEW POLITICS 

its particular torso shall manage to thrill to as many as 
possible pleasurable sensations (and as few painful ones) 
before in the course of human events it ceases to respond 
to anything at all. 

Its motive is self-interest. 

Its point of view is self. 

This is individualism. 

This is the philosophy of Ishmael. 

This is the philosophy of life of the Anglo-Saxon 
world to-day. It may not be confined to the Anglo- 
Saxon world, but the world's business is being carried on, 
and the world's life is being lived under a philosophy 
of life which has no adequate ethical foundation, and 
is devoid of the very possibility of an ethical foundation. 

Perhaps I may be permitted to register a personal con- 
viction that the present world activity, world aim, and 
outlook will never be profoundly modified except by a 
world religious movement. Should ever we find an abso- 
lutely true ethical philosophy it can appeal only to a few. 
It will be adequate to such philosophers as may both 
comprehend, believe, and follow it. It will sustain those 
who already constitute the elect, but for the struggling 
and stricken hordes of humanity, their souls can 
never be welded into a fundamental and sustaining prin- 
ciple except in the white heat of passion. Ethical sys- 
tems will continue to throw light upon the pathways 
of men, but men are so constituted they must have 
heat as well as light, and action must follow direction, 
and behind knowledge there must be the active will. 

It has been growing upon me the more I read of 



ETHICS AND INDIVIDUALISM 43 

human history, and the more I see of my fellow men, 
that what this world needs more than all else just now, 
is not so much more knowledge as living up to the best 
we know. 

It needs Kant's only unconditional good — good will. 



CHAPTER III 

THE SEPARATION OF ETHICS FROM ECONOMICS 

The divorce of ethics from modern economic theory 
has resulted in the separation of morals from modern 
business life. This separation is due more to Adam 
Smith than to any other man who ever lived, excepting 
perhaps the man who did most to separate ethics from 
politics before him, Machiavelli. Smith has been fol- 
lowed blindly for four generations, and the system he 
founded still exercises a fearful influence upon the 
Anglo-Saxon mind. His chief contributions are his 
method and point of view, which have been peculiarly 
agreeable to the Anglo-Saxon mind. Adam Smith sepa- 
rated from economics whatever foundations in ethics it 
ever had. This was done by the isolation of the study 
of the subject of wealth from human values. While 
Goethe, in Germany, was clamoring for that exalted point 
of view which could see life, and "see it whole," the 
reaction started by the "Wealth of Nations'" was not 
merely analytic, as in the body of it is developed the 
theory of the division of labor, but it was also destruc- 
tive in the isolation of the study of wealth from human 
values. "He simply discussed the question of wealth/' 
says Professor Cunningham. "Its bearing on the con- 
dition of the state was an afterthought." So, I fancy, 
was its bearing on the condition of humanity. 

The keynote of the mercantile system which the 
Smithian scheme superseded was national efficiency. 

44 



ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 45 

National wealth was considered as a means to national 
power. Smith said, in substance, so far as this inquiry- 
is concerned, wealth is the end of human endeavor. The 
pathetic thing about it all is, that four generations of 
disciples, which have included several hundreds of mil- 
lions of human beings, have lived by the proposition 
that wealth is the end of human endeavor. This very- 
isolation of wealth from every deeper human interest, 
so universally commended by economists, has had 
the most unfortunate, even tragical, results. They tell 
us that it introduced an immense simplification; that it 
dealt with economic phenomena as with physical objects 
and natural laws ; that while, to his English predecessors, 
economics had been a department of politics and morals, 
his English successors recognized that in Smith's hands it 
"became analogous to physics,'' and that they "delighted 
to treat it by the methods of mechanical science," and 
that this "has brought about the development of modern 
economic theory." 

The economists tell us that this mechanical treatment 
of a human subject "introduced an immense simplifica- 
tion." So it did. It did so by stripping from it every 
relationship it sustained to the spiritual world. It did 
so by reducing it to a sheer sodden materialism. 
"Immense simplification," indeed! So was that later 
physiology which isolated the human body, separated it 
from soul, stated human life in terms of chemistry and 
spirit in terms of physics, e. g., a mode of motion. 

The divorce of ethics from economics has resulted 
in what Carlyle characterized as the "dismal science." 
Hence the Englishman under the system of economic 



46 THE NEW POLITICS 

individualism which flowered out of the Glasgow School 
into the Manchester School became such a creature 
that to awaken his real beliefs Carlyle said of him: "You 
must descend to his stomach, purse, and adjacent 
regions." This "dismal science" was founded on an 
attempt to create a certain phase of human economics 
without reference to the human, having foisted in its 
place a certain "covetous machine" which for want of a 
better name — or worse — was called "economic man." 
This monstrous theory would have been baleful enough 
exuding classic poison in academic shades. Unfortu- 
nately, it escaped these confines and spread over the 
business world like running fire. Had not Smith dis- 
covered a new law in license and that every stream of 
unrestricted selfish instinct trickled finally into the millen- 
nial river of the common good? The result of the 
Smithian scheme has been perhaps the nearest approach 
to pure and absolute anarchy ever seen in the world in. 
any commanding position for so great a length of time; 
that anarchy found in the political, industrial, and com- 
mercial history of the Anglo-Saxon peoples in their 
century-long orgie of laissez faire sometimes known as 
the gospel of Manchester. 

Leroux, the French Socialist, said, "Man is an animal 
transformed by reason and united to humanity." 

The Anglo-Saxon individualists taught that man or 
economic man, in whose image they tried to recreate 
mankind, was a brute transformed by an unrestrained 
and acquisitive greed and detached from humanity. 
Thus economics disguised and parading in the mas- 
querade of unctuous phrases and of words humbugged 



ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 47 

and bereft of all original and lawful content, entered 
the lists as welcome champion of the Scarlet Lady of 
financial privilege and it has remained faithful to its 
illicit amour to this day. 

Starting with the anarchy of individualism, a selfish 
and wholly irresponsible instinct to be not only gratified 
but glutted, this school turned its back upon the future 
and its face toward that barbarism, "nature red in tooth 
and claw," and hit the trail of the ichthiosaur and ptero- 
dactyl. "Assuming," as Ruskin has said, "not that the 
human being has no skeleton, but that it is all skeleton, 
it founds an ossifant theory of progress on this negation 
of soul, and having shown the utmost that can be made 
of bones, and constructing a number of interesting 
geometrical figures with death's heads and humeri, suc- 
cessfully proves the inconvenience of the reappearance 
of a soul among these corpuscular structures." 

The foundation of the Glasgow and the Manchester 
schools of economics was the same as that of the juris- 
prudence of Bentham, and the politics of Rousseau, and 
of his perhaps two most distinguished disciples, Thomas 
Jefferson and Maximillian Robespierre. That foun- 
dation was individualism. The fundamental error of 
the economists was in their conception of values; in 
making wealth the sole end of man instead of man the 
sole end of wealth. The result was not a political 
economy, but an economy of commercialism, which was 
a pure money-getting materialism on Machiavellian foun- 
dations. Considering everything from the standpoint of 
egoism they set up a crass and brutal end to be gained, 
and subordinated humanity — that is to say, also, ethics 



48 THE NEW POLITICS 

and religion — to the role of means to the attainment of 
the end. Smithian economics is Machiavellianism on the 
bargain counter. This is why economics knows no 
ethics, and is as wholly divorced from a philosophy of 
right and wrong as is a table of logarithms — why this 
"enlightened self-interest" (a phrase which apologizes 
for itself) — Smithianismus, as the Germans call it — 
is in business what Machiavellianism is in politics. 

The pleasing fiction of economic man, acting under 
economic law, was about as true to life as was Rous- 
seau's man in a state of nature, where, indeed, economic 
man might have been evolved. It is a highly suggestive 
fact that when Darwin looked about him for a phrase 
to fit the struggle of the beast for existence he found 
what he was looking for in the "ethics" of the Man- 
chester school, namely, the survival of the strong and 
cunning (although he named it, inaccurately and un- 
fortunately, the "survival of the fittest"). 

This is a plain statement of the economic law of unre- 
strained competition where the big eat the little, and 
Darwin frankly admitted that Malthus on "Population" 
suggested the "Origin of the Species." 

The academic separation of ethics and politics had 
preceded the separation of ethics and economics. Prac- 
tical statesmen, indulging their own self-love, backed 
and promoted by powerful interests which knew no 
motive but that of the primeval selfish instinct, found it 
only too easy to take the academician at his word. 
Machiavellian Politics is concerned only with success. 
Smithian Economics is concerned only with wealth. 
Neither has the slightest leaning toward a fundamental 



ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 49 

appreciation of values and neither has an adequate con- 
ception of humanity. In both, ethical and spiritual con- 
siderations must be considered only as means toward 
material ends. 

"The intrusion of ethics into economics/' says Profes- 
sor Keynes, "cannot but multiply and perpetuate sources 
of disagreement. ,, (Hobson.) The same may be said 
of the intrusion of ethics into Politics and government, 
or indeed the intrusion of religion into life. The "sources 
of disagreement" in the great questions of human wel- 
fare appear as rapidly as the ethical consideration 
"intrudes." But why "intrudes"? The language is an 
impudent intimation that ethics is some sporadic and 
non-essential, non-human quality. As a matter of fact, 
all human relations involve, fundamentally, such ethical 
considerations, in that they are unimaginable apart from 
these ethical foundations. They involve not only the 
economic problems of waste and utility, but the ethical 
question of human rights and human uses and abuses. 
Ethics cannot "intrude" where these problems exist. 
The very problems themselves are ethical, and if they 
multiply and perpetuate sources of disagreement, those 
sources may be found where the claims of privilege assert 
themselves and those of justice determine. 

One of the most curious and, indeed, the most unin- 
telligent corollaries of the Manchester system, is the 
development and use of the word law. It has resulted 
in one of the most pitiful of the confusions of modern 
times. It may be partly owing to the poverty of our 
language that the word law has been used for the pur- 
pose of misleading the popular mind. When the sue- 



5 o THE NEW POLITICS 

cessors of Smith began to treat economic phenomena on 
the basis of a physical or mechanical science, they 
deduced certain "law." The people were used to con- 
sidering a law as a rule of conduct. It was something 
which must be obeyed. The leaders of thought did not 
make the proper distinctions between a law of science, 
which is nothing more or less than a statement of how 
certain things behave, and a law which is evolved in the 
social structure, containing a spiritual element, which 
the purely physical realm does not. In science a law 
has no ethical bearing. In the relations of mankind a 
law is inconceivable, as not involving an element of obli- 
gation, a principle of right and wrong. 

It may be said with justice that the Manchester school 
knew practically no law, as, outside the realm of physi- 
cal science, we are used to interpreting the word law, 
for it was destitute of ethics. The very basis of all 
human law, political or economic, the more so moral 
law, is obligation. The only obligation recognized in the 
whole life philosophy of individualism was that to get 
pleasure, the most of which was to get riches. Prudence 
took the place of duty. Honesty was no more than the 
best policy. If it ever could be shown, or if it ever 
appeared, that in order to get rich there was a more 
effective policy — so much the worse for honesty. So 
with all the other prudences which the old-fashioned had 
known as virtues. The whole system was a soulless 
scheme of exploitation built on the denial of spirit, 
leaped upon by the ignoblest elements in mankind and 
perpetuated in justification of their ignobility. When 
the Manchester school began to talk about economic law 



ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 51 

it began to apologize for itself and made an exhibition 
at once ignorant and ludicrous. 

The economic man behaves so and so. A statement 
of his behavior is economic law. It is natural for him to 
follow his selfish instinct. Each man following his self- 
ish instinct works for the good of the whole, therefore 
each man ought to follow his selfish instinct — "quod erat 
demonstrandum." 

This is the economic law. Law must be obeyed. 
People must behave in business as "economic men," not 
as human beings and Christians, for getting wealth is 
the chief end, and this gets wealth. The weak must perish. 
The strong and cunning must survive. Because they 
survive they are fittest — not fittest to their environment, 
but fittest to survive. Economic law is, "Whatever is, is 
right." Because it is so it ought to be so. People are 
selfish, therefore they ought to be selfish. 

Here was a "law" men were only too willing to obey. 
It took no uncommon casuistry to circumvent the little 
difficulties a shrinking conscience might heap in its way. 
The Manchester moralist did not even teach that Might 
is Right because it did not recognize the need of right. 
It substituted for I ought, I want. This new categorical 
imperative has dominated the business world for over a 
hundred years. 

This benign and most Christian philosophy is stated 
by the Rev. Malthus in all its nakedness in the appendix 
to his essay on Population. 

"The great Author of Nature, by making the passion 
of self-love beyond comparison stronger than the passion 
of benevolence, has at once impelled us to that line of 



52 THE NEW POLITICS 

conduct which is essential to the preservation of the 
human race. He has enjoined every man to pursue, as 
his primary object, his own safety and happiness (includ- 
ing his family). By this wise provision the most ignorant 
are led to promote the general happiness, an end which 
they would have totally failed to attain if the moving 
principle had been benevolence." 

A modern philosopher, who has been wrongly classed 
with the individualists, opposes to the saying of the rev- 
erend gentleman above quoted, "So much benevolence 
as a man hath so much life has he." It was the German 
philosopher who found benevolence the deepest of all 
things in time or space, for it was Emmanuel Kant who 
said that good will is the only unconditioned good in the 
universe. 

Adam Smith argued that if trade were left alone it 
would discover how it could go best and that to follow 
self-interest would promote the best interests of society. 
Mr. Leslie Stephen naively remarks, "Adam Smith's 
position is intelligible. It was," he thought, "a proof 
of providential order that each man by helping himself 
first unintentionally helped his neighbor." It is fairly 
probable that a consistent individualist will help himself 
first, and, if he helps his neighbor, it will be unintentional. 

When Bentham writes on economic legislation 
(Manual of Political Economy, 1789), after stating his 
theory that security and freedom are all that industry 
requires, he concludes that all economic legislation is 
improper. Out of this theory, which Arnold Toynbee 
sums up as "Man's self-love is God's providence," 
grew the orthodox political economy and the utilitarian 



ETHICS AND ECONOMICS 53 

jurisprudence, and the whole system of what is known 
as "Cobden's Calico Millennium/' and which might be 
not inappropriately styled a dough philosophy, since the 
two articles of his creed were "get gain" and the "cheap 
loaf is the chief end of man." 

Carlyle, in one of his gentlest moods, thus character- 
izes the prevailing "ethics" of individualism: "Moral 
evil is unattainability of Pigs wash; moral good attain- 
able good of ditto. It is the mission of universal Pig- 
hood, and the duty of all Pigs, to diminish the quantity 
of unattainable and increase the attainable. All knowl- 
edge, and device, and effort ought to be directed thither 
and thither only; Pig Science, Pig Enthusiasm, and 
Devotion have this one aim. It is the whole duty of 
Pigs. Quarreling is attended with frightful effusion of 
the general stock of Hogs wash and ruin to large sec- 
tions of universal Swine's trough; Wherefore let quar- 
reling be avoided." 

The conception has been slowly growing upon the world 
that there are other laws to be considered than those 
rules under which a few economic Calibans and financial 
Frankensteins may get rich; laws which involve the 
elements of obligation and spirit framed with reference 
to a world's welfare which is the result of something 
other than a jungle of selfish instincts. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SEPARATION OF ETHICS FROM POLITICS 

"Machiavelli," says Bonar (Philosophy and Political 
Economy, p. 60), "has been said, by Knies, to have 
'thrown ethics out of politics as Spinoza threw Ethics 
out of Ethics.' " It could have been said more com- 
prehensively that those thinkers have thrown ethics out 
of politics and economics and even out of ethics, who have 
founded ethics on a philosophy of life which justifies 
human selfishness. 

The justification of the selfish instinct is the denial 
of good will and the elimination of good will removes 
the bottom from an ethical and rational society. 

"When one thinks of how Empires and States have 
been tossed about from hand to hand by the chances of 
war and brute force, of Might in a word; how hordes 
of marauders have from the morrow of some success- 
ful campaign continued to sit dividing the spoils of 
whole countries among themselves for centuries, while 
throwing the leavings to the vanquished as to their 
dogs; or how in industrial ages bands of speculators 
rising on the backs of the patient multitude and by be- 
coming multimillionaires" (the multibillionaire has been 
invented within a few months) "raising or depressing the 
markets of the world at their pleasure with the stroke 
of a pen ; when one thinks of this, and of how those who 
feel the pinch of it in their narrow and straitened 
household lives (regarding it as they might a famine or 

54 



ETHICS AND POLITICS 55 

any other visitation of God) think it all quite natural — 
with these effronteries of Power staring us in the face, 
one feels that to profess to take seriously all the organ- 
ized machinery of courts of Law and Justice by 
which are nicely determined the exact amount of right 
or wrong, of praise or penalty, involved in the stealing 
of pence or sixpences, is an elaborate hypocrisy. . . . 
Emerson said that you might as well sit in a church and 
listen with pious hypocrisy to doctrines which you no 
longer believed, for if you went outside into the street 
things were just as bad." Crozier goes on to state: 
(History of Intellectual Development, vol. iii, p. 232) 
that right will come to its fruition "without doubt in 
some millennial time ; but it will come neither with moral 
preaching nor moral discussions. It will come when the 
Material and Social Conditions, which have permitted or 
encouraged a section of the Community to load the dice, 
while the rest look on and give them a free hand by re- 
garding it as right and natural — it will come when these 
material and social conditions are altered, and not till 
then. By which I mean that Moral Philosophy and 
Ethics are a department of Politics, have their roots in 
Politics and cannot on pain of falsehood and error be 
divorced from Politics; as Politics itself in turn has its 
roots in civilization. " 

I will go further than this and say: 

There is no hope of the politics of this world until 
they have been moralized and no hope of morals until 
they have been spiritualized. The untamed ferocity of 
the human heart is the bottom fact we have to deal with. 
The wild beast in mankind will never be tamed or 



56 THE NEW POLITICS 

even caged until the life philosophy of a considerable 
portion of the race has abandoned individualism; until 
their habits and institutions have eliminated the principle 
of free competition — strife — if not based on hatred, the 
mother of hatred ; and until to a large degree good will 
has become a motive among men. 

The contribution of the Christian religion is that 
humanity must be broken up into individualities which 
must be perfected, so to speak, before the world can 
assume anything like a proper social form. These units 
must be born again — i. e., turned inside out — i. e., must 
become God-centered instead of self-centered beings, as 
the very elemental condition of that "earnest expec- 
tation of creation which shall reveal sons of God." A 
human society composed of individuals reborn and per- 
fected out of the ancient despotic state smashed into 
its individual and component parts ; and a state growing 
out of the common reason and common conscience and 
common life; and this state rationally conceived and 
self-wrought and self-imposed ; in other words, an ethical 
democracy wherein the very forms of association embody 
an immanent reason and ethic, is the state made possible 
by the Christian revelation. 

So far the process is but half complete. The individual 
has been emancipated but not reborn. This, of course, 
is not to say but that there are a few Christians in the 
world. The tyranny of Rome imposed from the outside 
is being disintegrated by the individualism of Protes- 
tantism, but in theology as in Politics we have not yet 
exceeded our point of view, which is individual instinct, 
or our motive, which is self-love. There is nothing alive 



ETHICS AND POLITICS 57 

today in Christendom which gives promise that human- 
ity is adequate to embody the Christian faith in bona 
fides and organize human society on the basis of reci- 
procity instead of that to-day universal reign of laisses 
faire self-love. 

In politics and economics the problem becomes one 
as to whether the element of good will shall find less or 
more scope; whether the area of the common good shall 
be enlarged or restricted; whether, in fact, the highest 
development of the human race lies toward the motive 
of good will and the ideal of a united and friendly 
humanity, or in the motive of the selfish instinct and the 
ideal of atoms at war. Here lies the problem of politics 
and the fate of democracy, in which, i. e., in the true 
democracy, not the false, is involved the future of human 
freedom. 

Thinkers of the school of Plato and Hegel hold up 
the realization of the moral law as the end of the state. 
Whatever Plato and Hegel may have taught, no actual 
state has so far set out to realize the whole moral law. 
Legislation laps largely over the moral law, but there are 
moral functions with which the state may quite properly 
have nothing to do. But, then, it will not do to reason 
from this to the separation of ethics and politics as so 
many have done. The state for one thing must real- 
ize within its own institutions the moral law; i. e., 
its laws and Constitution must be the projection of a 
rational and ethical idea. This is very different from 
the Platonic-Hegelian conception that the whole moral 
code must be enforced. It means that whatever is real- 
ized and institutionalized must be realized ethically. 



58 THE NEW POLITICS 

But the testimony is overwhelming in the life and 
literature of modern times that the political theories of 
civilization actually have been separated from ethics; 
that Politics at the beginning of the twentieth century 
is in a state as pagan, as selfish and materialistic, as 
individualistic — perhaps almost as completely as if 
Aristotle and Jesus had never lived. 

Between the days of Greece in her glory and Italy 
of the Renaissance there is little to flatter the egotism 
of mankind. The Crusades were the first great chal- 
lenge to individualism during the medieval age. They 
crystallized to a degree the ideas of a new era ; curtailed 
and mitigated the fratricidal cruelties of private war; 
in their rough way reinspired Christendom with the 
spirit of solidarity and altruism; strove after something 
higher than fratricidal bloodshed and political piracy in 
reaching out with an unselfish motive not to conquer 
new lands but to recover the "patrimony of the Cruci- 
fied." "They were the first great effort of medieval life 
to go beyond the pursuit of selfish and isolated ambi- 
tions ; they were the trial feat of the new world, essaying 
to use to the Glory of God and the benefit of man the 
arms of its new Knighthood." (Stubbs, Lectures on 
Medieval and Modern History, p. 157.) Alas, to fail 
from jealousies, dissensions, strifes — individualism — at 
last! 

One is not surprised at the political ideals of the Re- 
naissance, when he knows something of the ferocity of 
the people of the period. But one of the tragic things 
over which a man of ethical insight loses his reputation 



ETHICS AND POLITICS 59 

for patience, if not his faith in mankind, is the spectacle 
of Machiavellianism triumphant in the twentieth century. 
Says Lord Acton of Machiavelli (Introduction to II 
Principe, Essays on Liberty, p. 231) : "He is the earliest 
conscious and articulate exponent of certain living forces 
in the present world. Religion, progressive enlighten- 
ment, the perpetual vigilance of public opinion have not 
reduced his empire. . . . He obtains a new lease of life 
from causes that are still prevailing and from doctrines 
that are still apparent in politics, philosophy, and science. 
. . . We find him near our common level ... a con- 
stant and contemporary influence . . . rationally intel- 
ligible when illustrated by lights falling, not only from 
the century he wrote in but from our own, which has 
seen the course of its history twenty-five times diverted 
by actual or attempted crime." 

This age, with its life and thought — especially its 
economic and political theories — is thrice accursed in that 
like the criminal of old it is condemned to carry a corpse 
chained to its back — the corpse of Machiavelli. 

Machiavelli was first among the modern advocates 
(not first in time but first in his malign power) — first to 
state clearly the political theory which justifies a man's 
selfishness to himself. This is what Christendom, and 
science, and philosophy have not yet refuted but adopted 
— what the "Christian" world stands for ; whose doctrine 
modern life apologizes for — this historian of "not the 
desperate resources of politicians at bay, but the avowed 
practice of decorous and religious magistrates." — • 
(Lord Acton.) 

Who has not read The Prince? Who has tried to 



60 THE NEW POLITICS 

take any responsible part in the world's life, or has read 
any considerable record of it in the histories of men 
dead and gone, or in the last morning paper, who has 
not run up against the openly avowed principles of The 
Prince? To be sure we have not many of us been sti- 
lettoed or poisoned, unless a few by the distinguished 
countrymen of our philosopher whom we have, in our 
loving kindness, made our honored guests at Ellis Island, 
and given the Black Hand the glad hand! Felicitations 
to our superlative complacency! 

One finds room to mention but one example, and that 
briefly. Let us say of Caesar Borgia, "vulgarly spoken 
of as Duke Valentino," who laid broad the foundations 
"whereon to rest his future power." 

Let us see just what this man Machiavelli means — 
this man who, more nearly than Jesus, rules the world 
to-day. Speaking of the Duke, the historian philoso- 
phizes: "And since this part of his conduct merits both 
attention and imitation I shall not pass over it in silence." 
The subjugation of Romagna to the Holy See was 
accomplished on paving stones of assassination. The 
Duke set over it, in order to establish 'good government,' 
Messer Romeiro d'Orco, who, with 'much credit to him- 
self,' restored it to tranquillity and order. . . . Knowing 
that past severities had generated ill-feeling against him- 
self . . . and availing himself of the pretext which this 
afforded, he one morning caused Romeiro (who had but 
served him faithfully) to be beheaded and exposed in the 
market place of Cesera with a black and bloody ax by 
his side. The barbarity of which spectacle at once 
astounded and satisfied the populace." 



ETHICS AND POLITICS 61 

This is one of the incidents to merit "both attention 
and imitation." After relating much more and perhaps 
worse of this man, the philosopher and founder of 
modern political ethics says without a shiver: "Taking 
all these actions of the Duke together, I can find no fault 
with him." 

Taine, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Art (p. 
97 et seq.), brings out very clearly the fact that political 
ethics — indeed, morality in general — is not at all depend- 
ent upon culture and art. He cites the case of Caesar 
Borgia and says : "You have but just* seen the repeated 
proofs of this high culture ; while manners have become 
elegant and tastes delicate, the hearts and characters of 
men have remained ferocious. These people, who are 
learned, critical, fine talkers, polished, and men of society, 
are, at the same time, freebooters, assassins, and murder- 
ers. Their actions are those of intelligent wolves. Sup- 
pose, now, that a wolf should form judgments of his 
species; he would probably found his code on murder. 
This is what happened in Italy; the philosophers erected 
the customs of which they were witnesses into a theory, 
and ended by believing or saying that if you wish to sub- 
sist or exist in this world you must act like a scoundrel. 
The most profound of these theorists was Machiavelli, 
a great man, and indeed an honest man, a patriot, a 
superior genius, who wrote a work called The Prince 
to justify, or at least to sanction, treachery and assassi- 
nation." 

"Everybody knows how laudable it is for a Prince to 
keep his word," says Machiavelli. Let us not be deceived. 
We are not reading the Institutes of Calvin, or a modern 



62 THE NEW POLITICS 

Sunday School Quarterly. Machiavelli, preacher of 
righteousness, appears now and then in the praise of 
virtue: It is better to tell the truth than to lie — when- 
ever it pays as well. Better let a man live than to poison 
him — if it equally suits your purposes. Assassination 
should not be considered a pastime. "Everybody knows 
how laudable it is for a prince to keep his word . . . 
but those princes have accomplished great things who 
have made little account of their faith and have known 
how, through craftiness, to turn men's brains and have 
at last destroyed those who built upon their loyalty. 
. . . A wise seignior cannot or ought not to keep his 
word when that is injurious to him. ... It is necessary 
. . . to be a competent cheat and dissimulator. . . . 
And men are so simple . . . that he who deceives always 
finds some one who lets himself be deceived." 

Lord Acton (Essays on Liberty, Introduction to II 
Principe, p. 214), himself a Catholic, declares that 
Machiavelli was popular at Rome, and that the Medicean 
popes "encouraged him to write, and were not offended 
at the things he wrote for them. Leo's own dealings 
with the tyrants of Perugia were cited by the jurists as 
a suggestive model for men who have an enemy to get 
rid of. Clement confessed to Contarini that honesty 
would be preferable, but that honest men get the worst 
of it." How long after this was it that Walpole wrote: 
"No great country was ever saved by good men, because 
good men will not go to the lengths that may be neces- 
sary." Romulus is justified in slaying Remus on the 
proposition that "a good result excuses any violence" 
(Discourses on Livy). 



ETHICS AND POLITICS 63 

One almost fears, in studying the Machiavellian 
remains in human society to-day, that there is truth in 
the words of Guicciardini, his contemporary : "That past 
things shed light on future things, for the world was 
always of the same sort, and all that which is and will 
be has been in former times ; and the same things return 
under different names." 

But Machiavellianism is the same thing and can be 
called by the same name. There is an unholy vitality in 
Machiavelli's doctrines. Everywhere, from Machiavelli 
until this minute, we find the vicious Jesuit maxim: 
"Cui licet finis, Mi et media permissa sunt" 

In politics, in business, in society, we are referred 
to the results rather than the motives — and the results 
of this doctrine have led to the interpretation of results 
in materialistic terms. "The end justifies the means. " 
Who has not met it, if, out of his teens, he has ever 
tried to do business. Good faith in business is almost a 
negligible quantity on the North American Continent — 
perhaps in a much wider field. Do our politicians keep 
faith ? Who will say so who has dealt closely with them ? 

"It is easier to expose errors in practical politics than 
to remove the ethical basis of judgments which the 
modern world employs in common with Machiavelli" 
(Lord Acton, Introduction to II Principe, Essays on 
Liberty, p. 219). 

It is not within our province here to discuss the na'ive 
brutality of Machiavelli's teachings as relating to matters 
of international ethics. But it is pertinent to ask if the 
foundations of Machiavellianism are the foundations of 
the modern "ethical" state. 



64 THE NEW POLITICS 

Is this world, as Machiavelli saw it, without principle 
or conscience? Is man, as Machiavelli saw and under- 
stood him, without conscience or principle? Professor 
Villari, Machiavelli's biographer, says we must leap from 
the "Politics" of Aristotle to Machiavelli "to gain an- 
other step in advance" (vol. ii, p. 94). 

"The problem proposed by Aristotle in his Politics 
was mainly an inquiry into the best form of Govern- 
ment. ..." "But Machiavelli had another object in 
view, and thus the governments imagined by philoso- 
phers was not of the slightest importance to him. Aris- 
totle chiefly sought to establish that which men and 
governments should be ; Machiavelli declared such inquiry 
to be useless, and rather tried to determine that which 
they are, and that which they might actually be," whose 
foundation is the stiletto and whose bulwark is poison. 

Machiavellianism is not the justification of an 
occasional murder. It is the propaganda of a philosophy 
of crime. It is not non moral, as so many have called it. 
It is not even immoral only. It is criminal. And the 
modern world upholds it and the philosophy of life 
underneath it, the justification of a man's selfishness to 
himself; the theory that might is right, that success 
justifies itself — the Real Politik of Schiller, Die Welt- 
Geschichte ist das Welt-Gericht. 



CHAPTER V 

THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRACY OF INDIVIDUALISM 

It is more than a coincidence for the curious that the 
year i Jj6 saw the publication, with Gibbon's Rome and 
Tom Paine's Common Sense, of Adam Smith's Wealth of 
Nations, Jeremy Bentham's Fragment of Government, 
and Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. It 
is as if three stars of the first magnitude had risen over the 
horizon, each promising to be a new world by itself, in 
Economics, Jurisprudence, Politics; and these three men 
stand for these three realms — first and foremost spokes- 
men of the New Thought and philosophy of individualism 
out of which grew the age of revolution and revolt. 

The world movement of which these incidents were 
indications was the resilient reaction of the human mind 
from age-long oppression toward personal liberty. We 
can hardly wonder that the swing of the pendulum 
carried to the other extreme. It cannot be said that in 
the past human government was all that could have been 
expected of it. It not only had been tyrannical and oppres- 
sive, but for thousands of years tyranny and oppression 
had been the principal subject of those who essayed to 
write history. Perhaps the future reader of history will 
say that the most wonderful thing revealed in it is the im- 
measurable patience of mankind — that so many kings 
have died in their beds. 

"Before the revolution," says Louis Blanc, "the domi- 
nant fact was the oppression of the individual. Until 

65 



66 THE NEW POLITICS 

then the movements of governments had been known 
only by their tyrannies and rapines. Men aspired only 
to break the molds of despotism in the form in which 
they were" (French Revolution, vol. i, p. 259). 

The dominant note of aspiration before and during 
the revolution therefore was relief. Liberty was both 
catchword and watchword, and in those days laissez 
faire was big with meaning. 

No wonder the people listened to Jean-Jacques when he 
wrote: "To find a form of association which defends 
and protects the person and property of each associate 
with all the common force"; and followed him as they 
would a new Messiah. 

The eighteenth century seems to have been one of 
those few disintegrating periods of the human mind 
which have been only too few in the history of our race. 
So wide an indignation, followed by so universal a 
revolt, must have had some puissant cause. It is not so 
easy as may be imagined to trace the sources and causes 
of Anglo-Saxon democracy. They are found in the 
main, however, in the ideas which dominated the 
eighteenth century — the century of revolt and revolu- 
tion. Although these ideas may be found scattered all 
along the history of human thought, it was not until the 
eighteenth century that they became the powerful causes 
of a world movement of the democracy of the modern 
world. 

In one word, modern democracy had its rise in indi- 
vidualism. "It is impossible to understand the errors of 
a great writer," says the late Professor Edward Caird, 
"unless we do justice to the truth which underlies them." 



RISE OF DEMOCRACY 67 

The same thing may be said of world movements. There 
was a profound reality underneath the world movement 
of eighteenth century individualism. While it is 
incontestable that Jacobinism is the logical development 
of individualism it is also true that modern history begins 
with the rise of individualism. 

The contribution to progress of individualism as a 
theory of life must not be belittled. It was one of the 
great phases of transition, and once lay toward progress. 
But it lies in that direction no longer. Individualism per- 
formed its mission. But individualism is a revolu- 
tionary creed. It was the vehicle of transition. Revo- 
lution is not a rational and permanent status. 

The century in which and of which the American 
nation was born was one which Carlyle declared has no 
history and can have little or none, "a century so opulent 
in accumulated falsities — opulent in that way as never 
century was! Which had no longer the consciousness 
of being false, so false had it grown — a hypocrisy worthy 
of being hidden and forgotten. To me the eighteenth 
century has nothing grand in it, except that grand uni- 
versal suicide, named French Revolution, by which it 
terminated its otherwise most worthless existence with at 
least one worthy act; setting fire to its old home and 
self, and going up in flame and volcanic explosion. . . . 
There was need once more of a Divine Revelation to 
the torpid, frivolous children of men if they were not to 
sink altogether into the ape conditions" (Frederick the 
Great). "How this man," continues Carlyle, speaking 
of Frederick II, "officially a king withal, comported him- 



68 THE NEW POLITICS 

self in the eighteenth century and managed not to be a 
Liar and Charlatan as his century was, deserves to be 
seen a little by men and kings." One of the regrets that 
Carlyle is no longer with us, is that it is now forever 
impossible to call his attention to the American continent 
— to our George Washington and a few other men — 
a LaFayette — a Steuben — who were not liars (how 
he would have relished the story of an eighteenth century 
boy, a hatchet, and a cherry tree), and were not charla- 
tans either. Perhaps the fact would have interested 
him, too, that there was an American Revolution with 
the adoption of certain eighteenth century principles in 
9 j6 and certain nineteenth century principles in '87 
which it may take the whole twentieth century to 
catch up to. If it was not the spirit of this unmen- 
tionable eighteenth century, which was the dynamic 
cause of two revolutions which have made over 
the world, and which have set human footsteps in a 
pathway never before trodden by mankind, it was the 
spirit of the eighteenth century which became the melt- 
ing pot, in which world-thought was reduced to fire 
mist again, and out of which chaos, cosmos, has (let us 
dare to hope) begun to cast up its rugged headlands. 
Nevertheless, when all has been said, Carlyle's char- 
acterization is in substance correct and it is one of those 
calamitous coincidences whose evil effects a thousand 
years may not overcome, that the philosophism of the 
eighteenth century has had so much to do with the begin- 
nings of our nation, with its institutions — that our 
national life was, like Noah's Ark, launched on this 
chaotic flood. 



* RISE OF DEMOCRACY 69 

It is a fairly wide field — which we could not traverse in 
a lifetime — this pitiful, and uninteresting, and reeking 
life and thought of the eighteenth century. The thinkers 
who have most profoundly affected it are those, 
unfortunately, to whom in a great measure we still are 
bending the knee of obeisance. 

The century was materialistic. This is perhaps the 
most that can be said of it in four words — and perhaps 
the worst. 

The eighteenth century is an object lesson of a 
materialistic philosophy. 

Perhaps this is the worst that can be said for a phi- 
losophy. Carlyle speaks of a similar object lesson in 
Diderot: "So that Diderot's Atheism comes if not to 
much, yet to something : we learn this from it, and from 
what it stands connected with, and may represent for us : 
that the Mechanical System of Thought is, in its essence, 
Atheistic; that whosoever will admit no organ of truth 
but logic, and nothing to exist but what can be argued 
of, must ever content himself with this sad result, as 
the only solid one he can arrive at; and so with the 
best grace he can, 'of ether make a gas; of God a force; 
of the second world a coffin; of man an aimless non- 
descript 'little better than a kind of vermin' " (Carlyle, 
Essay on Diderot). 

The blight of eighteenth century life and thought still 
hangs over the earth like a pall. It is the same curse 
which darkens the days we live in, immensely modified 
hut in no way mitigated by our great prosperity and our 
physical science. It has been immensely modified and 
mitigated, but it is because we are changing our 



70 THE NEW POLITICS 

eighteenth century point of view. We are abandoning 
atheism, materialism, Hedonism, individualism. We 
have discovered the spirit again. Patriotism and the 
ideal may live once more, to the contrary Dr. Cabanis 
and his doctrine that poetry and religion are "the product 
of the smaller intestines. ,, 

A great deal — and perhaps a great deal too much — 
has been said as to the French Revolution being the begin- 
ning of modern history. It is also a shabby truism that 
the nineteenth century is unintelligible without reference 
to the same event. 

The real truth is that which Carlyle missed, that the 
beginning of the American nation is the beginning of 
modern history, because the whole world has been modi- 
fied by the development of democracy in the United 
States. It is not cosmopolitan judgment to reckon the 
French Revolution as the beginning of millennial days. 
Parenthetically it has not fulfilled its promise of liberty, 
equality, and fraternity. 

We must consider the American and French Revolu- 
tions as both the outgrowth of the spirit of the eighteenth 
century, with a strong probability that the second would 
not have taken place had not the first been a success. If 
Napoleon was right, or even nearly so, when he declared 
that if Rousseau had not lived there would have been no 
French Revolution, may we not conclude with some 
assurance that the conflagration broke out in France be- 
cause the "heather was afire" here? 

As a matter of fact the influence of the French Revo- 
lution upon the world, and even upon France, has been 
greatly overestimated. It is one of the most lurid 



RISE OF DEMOCRACY 71 

dramas ever presented on the stage of history. And 
there was some element of play acting in it, too, with 
some of its second rate gilded and garish humbug and 
unreal emotion. Of course only some. 

Whatever germinal ideas there were in that soil of 
French thought came mostly from Great Britain. And 
germinal initiative came from America. This particular 
cataclysm at least is the offspring of British thought and 
American example. Nor has America been without her 
germinal thinking, for the theories and formulas and 
phrases which saw service in two revolutions and which 
perhaps defined Jacobinism on two hemispheres were all 
debated and threshed out, stated and accepted in national 
and local declarations in America before they became cur- 
rent in France. "Ten years after the American Alliance 
(with France) the Rights of Man which had been pro- 
claimed in Philadelphia were repeated at Versailles" 
(Lord Acton, History of Freedom). 

Read the names of those who were makers of Revo- 
lution in France. We find the most of them in London 
with Pope and Addison and Bolingbroke and Swift, with 
Newton and Hume and Hobbes and Locke. We find 
them in the coffee houses, salons. We see them studying 
English laws and institutions with English literature 
— Voltaire and Montesquieu, Brissot and Buffon, Mau- 
pertius and Gournay, Jussieu, Morellet and LaFayette, 
Helvetius, Cloots and Mirabeau, the Rolands and Rous- 
seau. 1 Through these minds the Revolution siphoned its 
force from the germinal minds and institutions of 
Britain into France. 



1 Morley's Voltaire. 



72 THE NEW POLITICS 

Both England and America had more influence on 
France than France has exercised on either country. As 
Professor Ritchie has said, "When LaFayette sent the 
key of the Bastille by Thomas Paine to George Wash- 
ington, he was in a picturesque symbol confessing the 
debt of France to America" (Natural Rights, p. 3). 

"What gave Rousseau a power far exceeding that which 
any political writer had ever attained was the progress 
of events in America" (Lord Acton). 

That was a strange and fateful alliance between the 
successors of the Grande Monarche and the American 
sans-culottes, for French nobles and common soldiers 
alike went home from the American Revolution to pro- 
claim the blessings of freedom and the dignity of revolt. 
In any event even without the alliance the whole French 
nation would have been ready to sympathize with the 
American insurgents. Were they not enemies of Eng- 
land? Were they not allies of France? Were they not 
uttering thoughts which Frenchmen hardly dared to 
dream? The spirit of the eighteenth century was be- 
coming clothed in flesh, and blood, and gunpowder — 
especially blood and gunpowder — and as some one has 
said, the whole people of France were watching with 
bated breath the struggle for liberty as if from behind 
prison doors, and, as it were, through iron bars. 

"American independence was the beginning of a new 
era," says Lord Acton. "Not merely as a revival of 
Revolution, but because no other Revolution ever pro- 
ceeded from so slight a cause or was ever conducted with 
so much moderation. The European monarchies sup- 
ported it. The greatest statesmen in England averred 



RISE OF DEMOCRACY 73 

that it was just. It established a pure democracy. . . . 
It resembled no other known democracy, for it respected 
freedom, authority and law. . . . Ancient Europe opened 
its mind to two new ideas — that Revolution with very 
little provocation may be just; and that democracy in 
very large dimensions may be safe." 

The philosophy, or rather philosophism of the eight- 
eenth century did not profoundly affect public opinion 
in France until the century was half gone. A few words 
were on men's lips — reason and tolerance, liberty, 
equality — and a nation made them catchwords — formed 
a creed. The philosophers had abandoned the Cartesian- 
ism which had reigned in French thought and they had 
learned the precepts of Bacon, the physics of Newton, 
and the sensationalism of Locke. These they brought 
across the channel. The translation of English phi- 
losophy into French life lost the conservative and judi- 
cious British temper. It became aggressive with being 
radical. The Briton could think radically and act con- 
servatively. Not so the Latin. The restated material- 
istic individualism of Hobbes and Locke became revo- 
lutionary. But it rediscovered the individual and his 
dignity was asserted as it never had been even in the 
morning of Greece. To Voltaire, Diderot, and the En- 
cyclopaedists, the masses were unconsidered canaille, but 
Rousseau conceived his philosophy as Michelet after- 
ward recorded the revolutionary record of his work from 
the standpoint "of the principal actor, the anonymous 
hero, the people." 

The doctrine that the individual is both starting point 
and end of political philosophy, implied in the writings 



74 THE NEW POLITICS 

of Grotius, had been elaborated by Hobbes and Locke, 
and taken by Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau. It be- 
came the foundation of the prevailing philosophy of the 
siecle. 

Locke had persuaded eighteenth-century France that 
all knowledge proceeds from experience, that experience 
is the outcome of combinations or permutations of our 
physical sensations. Despising metaphysics, the move- 
ment of the new philosophy seemed to tend toward those 
things within the field of the five senses and conse- 
quently an impetus was given to the sciences, in all of 
which great progress was made, but with reaction toward 
an atheistic materialism as hopeless and desolate as that 
in which any nation was ever lost. But under the new 
enlightenment there were strange paradoxes and incon- 
sistencies. The somber messengers of atheism rolled 
stones away from sepulchers where the Church had laid 
the crucified virtues, and Christian principles came 
forth from the dead ; liberty, equality, justice, fraternity. 

It is impossible to connect logically with a blank 
atheistic materialism the divine sentiment of fraternal- 
ism or to conceive of a logical place in a Godless uni- 
verse for a brotherhood of orphans. It is impossible to 
harmonize a conception of man as a sensuous conscious- 
ness without a soul, with a faith in liberty, justice and 
toleration. 

There is no logical sequence between a belief which not 
merely negatives, but which holds that science proves 
there is neither God, soul, freedom, or hope of here- 
after, and a belief in the essential and inherent dignity 
of the least and humblest of all the human race. Neither 



RISE OF DEMOCRACY 75 

is there logical relationship between their altruism and 
their individualism. 

We must look further for explanation of the fact 
that they so often appear together, and wonder how 
religious a race eighteenth-century France would have 
been, had only the Church been true. 

The French Economistes ( Physiocrats ) , who were the 
precursors of Adam Smith and orthodox political econ- 
omy, had also derived their inspiration from Dutch and 
English sources. Quesnay, following Grotius and Locke, 
calls his system physiocratic since he conceives it a 
development of the nation of a law of nature — or that 
"Constitution of Government which is best for man 
because most in accordance with Nature.' ' Natural order 
is antecedent to natural right. They have been accused 
of advocating a paternal despotism. They did advocate 
state activity in poor relief and education. But they 
paved the way for laissez faire and revolution. Their 
general political doctrine was that of the social contract 
of the English school, that government is an evil (but 
necessary up to the point of gaining security of person 
and property). In economics labor should be unfettered 
and trade free and property sacred. This is the bour- 
geois creed. 

The principal contribution of Montesquieu that social 
as well as physical phenomena are to be regulated by 
jus natures easily falls in with the deism of the period 
and forms the basis of the philosophy (where doubtless 
Montesquieu and Voltaire learned it) of Bolingbroke, 
Swift, Pope, of "whatever is, is right. ,, It is a swift 
transition from natural law to natural rights and upon 



?6 THE NEW POLITICS 

this the political theory of the eighteenth century is- 
founded and issues at once in individualism, free trade,, 
and laissez faire. 

Montesquieu, who had studied closely the British Con- 
stitution and whose theory of government had been pro- 
foundly influenced by the writings of Locke, was an 
advocate of Constitutional reform in France along 
English lines, as opposed to the revolutionary theories 
of Rousseau which were also drawn from the study of 
Locke. But a revolution like that of 1688 in England 
could hardly be a peaceable and personally conducted 
affair in France, a country where the crown was supreme 
and where there had been no assembly of the States 
General from 1614 to 1789 — a hundred and seventy-five 
years. The doctrines of the sovereignty of the people 
and the social contract Rousseau took from Hobbes and 
Locke and adapted to the continental environment. 
The doctrine of the law of nature was acceptable to the 
French masses mostly because it offered something radi- 
cally different from the existing regime. What they 
had was not natural. What was natural must be good. 
The doctrine went through many forms and lent itself 
to almost any number of individual interpretations while 
insisting on the right of individual interpretation. The 
popular feeling became inflamed. The doctrine became 
aggressive and revolutionary. One stream of thought 
flowing from it, with its catchwords of "reason," and 
"nature," etc., became crystallized in the atheistic sys- 
tems of Holbach, Diderot, and the Encyclopaedists and 
the work of Helvetius, which Louis Blanc characterizes 
as "The very code of individualism, the theory of my- 



RISE OF DEMOCRACY 77 

self." "Thus in the book of Helvetius the absolute was 
banished from the world. Virtue, truth, devotion, hero- 
ism, intellect, genius, everything was relative, and each 
one judging of everything but by himself alone, society- 
fell into dissolution." 

Rousseau taught that history was a process arranged 
between conspiracies of priests and lawyers and kings, 
to defraud the people of their rights ; therefore laws and 
religions are humbug and must be swept away. He 
claimed that the rich and crafty were able to turn to 
their own advantage the very desires and efforts of the 
poor for their own protection. "They formed a project/* 
he says, "the most astute that ever entered the human 
spirit, by which to convert their adversaries into their 
defenders, to inspire them with wholly new maxims, 
and to introduce institutions which would be as favor- 
able to them as natural law and the law of the strong 
were the contrary. This succeeded in their institutions 
of law and government, when civilization gave new fet- 
ters to the feeble, and new forces to the rich, which de- 
stroyed beyond recovery natural liberty, fixed forever the 
law of property and inequality, converted a clever usur- 
pation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a 
few ambitious men, subjected henceforth all the human 
race to servitude and misery.'' 

If the common people were everywhere born free and 
were everywhere in chains, Rousseau's followers claimed 
that it was time for them to make another contract and 
take sovereignty back into their own hands. In a way 
Rousseau's method was quite logical on a deistic basis, 
but quite unimaginable from a theistic point of view. 



78 THE NEW POLITICS 

It was something like this : Man cannot improve on 
God's method. Natural law is better than man's law. 
The method of nature is better than the artificial method 
of man. Therefore let us go back to nature. The idea 
of an immanent God working through the reason and 
will of man never in the remotest sense occurred to him. 
This is where he missed his clue. He recurred to a state 
of nature much like the paradise of Calvin out of which 
man fell all at once, only to conceive of it as something 
out of which man had been falling for a long time. 
Pursuing this chimerical phantasm instead of returning 
to the alleged original paradise, he went back to nature 
"red in tooth and claw," and adopted the methods of a 
reptilian age, with all the silurian instincts of the child- 
hood of the world — laissez faire individualism. The 
logic is irrefutable if the premises are granted. If the 
woes of mankind are due to the intervention of human 
intelligence and will — in other words human institutions 
— take these away. Since all government is slavery, the 
less government we have the better. Laissez faire, lais- 
sez passer, laissez aller. Thus arose the democracy of 
individualism. This is why the eighteenth century be- 
lieved too little in any government, too little in law and 
order, and too much in personal liberty and the policy 
of drift and chance. Rousseau's belief that the work of 
civilization should be undone so far as possible found a 
champion in Robespierre; and the corollary of this 
belief that the work of civilization, i. e., of man's con- 
scious effort politically to improve himself should, as 
far as possible, be avoided, found expression in the laissez 
faire democracy of Thomas Jefferson and his school. 



RISE OF DEMOCRACY 79 

And yet this man, Rousseau, who did more than any 
one modern for the establishment of democracy, declared 
it a government for gods but unfit for man. Half a 
maniac and the other half a degenerate (a whole 
prophet nevertheless of these two halves), holding to 
neither system, nor logic, nor consistency — a neurotic 
and sentimentalist — he played on one emotion until he 
touched the heart of Europe. The whole message may 
be summed up in the sovereignty of the mob. In this 
he created a despot more frightful than any which had 
ever cursed the ancient regime. It was a genie he let 
out of the bottle, mild enough at first sight, but a raven- 
ing despot at best — that of a reckless anarchical majority 
of a mob — why not bestow upon it an epithet Voltaire 
once gave to Pasquier (Letter to D'Alembert), "A 
tiger with the eyes of a calf"? Under this regime "In 
the name of the 'Social Contract' Robespierre and his 
clique put to death all whose interests were opposed to the 
Rousseau theory of the state" (Macpherson — Century 
of Political Development, vide p. 39-40) — these men 
"who began their democratic career by preaching the 
gospel of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Equality 
became the equality of the brigand with his 'stand and 
deliver' ; liberty became the liberty of the executioner to 
take off the heads of his victims ; and fraternity became 
the fraternity of Cain when he spilled his brother's 
blood upon the ground" (idem). "Out of Rousseau's 
gospel of Liberty grew the Terror and thence grew 
Napoleon's gospel of Despotism" (idem). 

The Protestant Reformation had been a movement of 



8o THE NEW POLITICS 

the individualism which assailed the foundations of 
Church and State — Catholicism and feudalism. It was 
successful in that it rediscovered the value and dignity 
of the human individual qua individual. Indeed, this 
was the contribution of Protestantism. Its failure lay- 
in offering a point of view which laid the foundations of 
the great movements of individualism, without offering 
a cohesive principle or a constructive idea sufficient for 
Church or State. And for Church and State the 
Reformation began the movement which founded its 
philosophy on a transitional idea. 

The theories which produced the revolutions of the 
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had created the 
Reformation before them. They brought forth fruit of 
disintegration and revolt in spirit, method, and result. 
The product of the ideas of the Reformation is seen in 
the revolutionary creed and program. "Calvin's Ge- 
neva," says the late Professor Ritchie, "in due time 
brought forth Rousseau, and English Puritanism or 
American soil produced the Declaration of Independ- 
ence." 

The fatal oversight of the theorists of Reformation 
and Revolution was that they found ultimate reality in 
the individual. They denied it of those spiritual and 
other relations which existed and which might exist be- 
tween individuals. There was no reality in the state — 
in the church — in the family. Individualism declared 
for atomism and anarchy. There was no universal 
principle — no vital binding principle which could give 
reality to a human institution. Reality existed solely in 
the human monad. Thus our thinking became atomistic. 



RISE OF DEMOCRACY 81 

It was without form and void. It gave us both theory 
and practice of disintegration. Somewhere here, I take 
it, is the nub of the ethical, which is to say, the philosophi- 
cal, side of this question of politics. And if this proposi- 
tion is true the assumptions of individualism are false 
which refer everything to the individual court of appeal, 
or in other words to some billion and a half courts of ap- 
peal; and which finds ultimate reality in the individual 
man, or in other words, a billion and a half individual 
men. 

The Reformation is said to have been an appeal to 
reason. If so, it is barely in the half sense of the reason 
of the individual man and not the reason of the social 
or the corporate mind. If it began the emancipation of 
the individual from slavery to the tyranny of Church, 
and State, it disclosed no rationale of Church and State. 

The result of this in the temporal affairs of men was 
anarchy. The revolutionary philosophy brought forth 
a revolutionary era, and the Church was so split into 
screaming and discordant sects, that a witty Frenchman 
could complain of America as the land where they had 
two hundred religions and only one gravy. 

The eighteenth century men wrote the end of the Dark 
Ages, not the beginning of a New Age (Mazzini). 
Their copiers and imitators have perfected the work of 
transition — the phase we are now passing through — and 
if we crystallize the transitional and negative principle 
into permanent institutions, we will reduce it to an ab- 
surdity and a crime. Out of the disintegrating ideas of 
the individualists of the eighteenth century, in which 
the old regime was dissolved, do not appear the affirma- 



82 THE NEW POLITICS 

tive principles which contain the promise and potency of 
the New Age. The philosophy of "The Enlightenment" 
was dangerously near the apotheosis of selfish instinct 
divorced from God and man. It believed in men. 
It had no faith in man. It was needed to break 
up the old foundations of accumulated tyranny. Indi- 
vidualism stormed the Bastile and erected the guillotine. 
Individualism entered the arena of accusation, sat in the 
tribunals, and drove the tumbrils of the revolution. Like 
Cadmus it slew the dragon but it planted his teeth. 
From the bloody ground where the red-eyed despot had 
so long guarded the waters of liberty sprang the mighty 
army of destruction, each ready to slay his companion 
in arms. A vast army, each dead by a comrade's hand, 
is the allegory of individualism handed us by the Greeks. 
The French Revolution is its realization by the eight- 
eenth century — in this blind unreasoning strife — this 
desolating hatred, this awful rage of every man for 
himself. 

Individualism furnished purely a destructive and nega- 
tive force. When the destructive work has been done 
and the debris has been cleared away, individualism has 
had its day and is no longer an adequate theory of life. 
The architect and builders must follow the wrecking 
crew. The creed of the Revolution has done its work in 
the world. It is not the creed for to-day. It has ceased 
to be true. 

The democracies of the past have been in a large de- 
gree forms of the democracy of individualism. Even 
an examination of the democracy of the Greeks shows 
a theory in some respects identical with that of the 



RISE OF DEMOCRACY 83 

Jeffersonian democracy over two thousand years later. 
The democracy of individualism upheld slavery and ex- 
ploited it. Is not the joke on their political ancestor and 
their followers and their creed; upon the man who 
heralded with fanfare of trumphets that all men are 
created free and equal, and that life, liberty, and happi- 
ness are the inalienable rights of all? If the democracy 
of individualism perpetuated human slavery until within 
the memory of men living, and if the human race is 
some hundreds of thousands of years old, what chance is 
there for the democracy of altruism in our day? 

It was the democracy of individualism which upheld 
slavery — the democracy of all rights and no duties — and 
neither a democracy nor a civilization nor a Christianity 
of individualism ever has been or ever can be ethical. 
As long as human slavery existed in our country, the 
catchwords of the Declaration of Independence and 
Jeffersonian Democracy — "Liberty," "Equality," and 
"Fraternity" — were all phrases of a farce which had 
shrieked until it was hoarse. Not only was the politics 
of our founders inadequate, but we have not been true 
even to those ideals, for our entire social philosophy to-day 
revolves around the idea underneath the Declaration of 
Independence — individualism — sufficient for any Protes- 
tantism, political or religious, so long as politics or 
religion is content to remain in the stage of mere Protes- 
tantism, or even Dissent. 

The democracy of the eighteenth century was the 
result of the conflict between individual freedom and 
organized selfishness. The failure of the democracy 
of individualism has been in the assumption that 



84 THE NEW POLITICS 

there is no individual selfishness and no organized 
freedom. 

Modern democracy had its rise in individualism. It 
is the task of the twentieth century to see that it does not 
have its fall in individualism. 



CHAPTER VI 

SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 

It was the American Revolution, not the French 
Revolution, if it was a revolution at all, which was the 
beginning of modern history. On the other hand it is 
quite true that the Revolution of the French and its 
underlying ideas profoundly modified the results of the 
American struggle and determined the course of Ameri- 
can political thought for a hundred years. American 
Jacobinism is largely a French importation. It is the 
French- American interpretation of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. If the French Revolution was the direct outcome 
of British thought and American example, the ideas of 
the Revolution and the Red Terror issued in America 
in anarchy and disintegration — in a word, in Jacobinism. 

"The French Revolution," says Col. Higginson, "really 
drew a red-hot plowshare through the history of Amer- 
ica as well as through that of France. It not merely di- 
vided parties, but molded them ; gave them their demarca- 
tions, their watchwords, and their bitterness. The home 
issues were for a time subordinate, collateral: the real 
party lines were established on the other side of the 
Atlantic." 

Robert Goodloe Harper, the South Carolina Federal- 
ist, in a debate in the House of Foreign Ministers, out- 
lined the situation by attacking the Republicans (Demo- 
crats) as revolutionists, whom he divided into three 
classes: the philosophers, the Jacobins, and the sans- 

85 



86 THE NEW POLITICS 

culottes. The first, he said, discoursed upon all the mis- 
eries of mankind, the vices of rulers — "all of which they 
engage to remove provided their theories should once be 
adopted. The Jacobins are tyrants in power and dema- 
gogues when not. Jefferson," he said, "returned from 
France a missionary to convert Americans to the new 
faith of Philosophical Jacobinism." 

Jefferson left Paris, soon after the fall of the Bastile, 
full of the theories of the Revolution and the ideas which 
generated it. In this he was at one with the mass of 
the American people, and perhaps it was due to this that 
he so soon rode into power. The Americans were grateful 
to France for their assistance. They hated England. 
They did not analyze the causes of the French alliance. 
They soon came to discover the anti-British motives 
cropping up in Napoleon which had prompted the action 
of Louis. They turned to those who inspired the Jacobin 
Terror. They took no trouble to distinguish between 
the King and nobles who had sent them aid and the mob 
who had cut off their heads, and from whom LaFayette 
and his associates were fleeing for their lives. As Oliver 
says i 1 "What had benefited the colonists, if we may 
borrow the felicitous phrase which Jefferson subse- 
quently adopted to designate the most unfortunate of 
monarchs, had been the cold-blooded calculation of 'a 
human tiger/ What had comforted their hearts had 
been the high-flown chivalry of comrades in arms, to 
whom France now offered the generous choice of furtive 
exile, the dungeon, or the guillotine. The debt of Ameri- 
can gratitude was due, if at all, to a King and his nobles, 

1 Alexander Hamilton. 



SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 87 

but by an effort of the popular imagination the bill was 
made payable to the assassins of the true creditors." 

How easily a nation may be led to any extreme 
through the phrases of the doctrinaire, and without the 
balance wheel of a strong government, is seen in the 
prodigious popularity of Citizen Genet, which became so 
near a frenzy that that "gentleman" dared insult the 
President of the United States, and that President George 
Washington. Jefferson, who had secretly encouraged 
his intolerable insolence, and who had done his utmost 
to lead the United States again to war against Great 
Britain, as France's ally, was compelled by Washington 
to repudiate Genet and promulgate the Washington dec- 
laration of neutrality, which, it is said, was as violently 
execrated by the democrats as a declaration of monarchy. 
This war, into which the bumptious and intolerable 
Genet came from the Revolutionary tribunal to drag the 
new nation, offered what advantage ? Unlimited cost in 
blood and money. For what? To defend the murderers 
of Madame Roland, Condorcet, Lavoisier — who wanted 
two weeks of life to finish some chemical experiments — 
and did not get them. "Gratitude to France," under 
Jefferson and the individualists, wanted war with Eng- 
land to uphold the assassins of the friends of America 
who a decade or two since had fought here by their sides. 

Such was the party spirit of Jacobin particularism — * 
so "intelligent" and so "patriotic." 

That which the Americans have been taught to look 
upon as our peculiar blessing may prove our special 
curse. Our nation was born, and, as it were, baptized 



88 THE NEW POLITICS 

in the flood-tide of eighteenth century individualism, and 
we have made the awful mistake of basing a permanent 
philosophy upon a transitional idea. To this fact we owe 
the dreary wastes of our first three quarters of a century 
of history, our civil war, and the despotism of modern 
financialism — i. e., to a set of ideas under which might 
becomes right and the big eat the little. 

We set out on our national career lashed to the wild 
ass of license. We gained our liberty and we lost our 
freedom. We have not found out to this day that our 
whole trouble is mostly due to what Taine has called 
"the Jacobin mind. ,, It accepts certain "principles" as 
political axioms — the rights of man — the social con- 
tract — liberty, equality, the people — "such are the ele- 
mentary notions. Precise or not, they fill the brain of 
the new secretary. Frequently they are there only as 
grandiose and vague words." The Jacobin mind "is 
not sound. Of the two faculties which ought to pull 
equally and together, one is smitten with atrophy, the 
other with hypertrophy. The counterpoise of facts 
is not there to balance the weight of formulas" (La 
Conquete Jacobin). He might have added that the 
balance wheel of principle is not there to justify the 
conflict of interests. 

The message of to-day is that the occupation of the 
Jacobin is gone. He shrieked loud and long for his 
rights — and got them — and more, too. He has been reti- 
cent about his obligations. He discovered that law and 
government, two aspects of a "necessary evil," depend 
upon contract — a contract never made, in an age which 
never existed. Back in this state of nature — in a pre- 



SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 89 

historic and mythic paradise whence man was driven by 
the serpent which was a strange compound of lawyer, 
priest, and king, the compact was made which gives 
validity to law and government, which are concerned 
merely with the protection of individual rights of person 
and property. The state has no other sphere. The 
state is an unpleasing and disagreeable fiction. Reality 
exists alone in the individual and, therefore, the state, 
having no reality, has no ethical function. Thus arose 
the modern democratic business theory of the state. 

The "philosophers" of the Jacobin era were solemnly 
accredited with having discovered and brought forth the 
charter of liberties of the human race, and with having 
accouched the muses of millennial dawn. A' hundred 
years and more are gone, and in this land of fertility 
and plenty, the "greatest" (in a material sense), the 
"richest," and the "most prosperous" the world has ever 
seen or ever will see, the masses of the people are 
enmeshed in the sinuous toils of financialism ; millions 
of the housewives of the men who are doing the nation's 
work are unable to make ends meet, owing to the universal 
rise in prices, and are haggling in the market place over 
the price of liver or the cut of a shank bone, while one 
man has ten or twelve thousand million dollars (perhaps 
he does not know how much) and eleven others like 
him could own the whole nation, and everything and 
everybody in it. Somehow the Jacobin has failed to ful- 
fill his promise, and democracy is somewhat tardy with 
the millennium. Swollen with the conceit of our hack- 
neyed phrases, and blinded by the tissue of optimistic 
lies with which we have surrounded ourselves, we have 



90 THE NEW POLITICS 

boasted of our inexhaustible resources while a few 
financiers were taking them away from us. 

The views of many of the fathers are better known 
than those of one whose writings could be studied with 
profit to-day. In his remarkable address before the 
Pennsylvania convention at Philadelphia in 1787, 
James Wilson said of the fruits of anarchy and Jacobin- 
ism (Works, vol, iii, Lorenzo Press, Phila., 1804) : 

"It has been too well known — it has been too severely 
felt — that the present confederation is inadequate to the 
government and to the exigencies of the United States. 
The great struggle for liberty in this country, should it 
be unsuccessful, will probably be the last one which she 
will have for her existence and prosperity in any part of 
the globe. And it must be confessed that this struggle has, 
in some of the stages of its progress, been attended with 
symptoms that foreboded no fortunate issue. To the 
iron hand of tyranny which was lifted up against her 
she manifested, indeed, an intrepid superiority. . . . But 
she was environed by dangers of another kind, and 
springing from a very different source . . . licentious- 
ness was secretly undermining the rock on which she 
stood." "Those whom foreign strength could not over- 
power have well nigh become the victims of internal 
anarchy." 

"The commencement of peace was the commencement 
of every disgrace and distress that could befall a people in 
a peaceful state. Devoid of national power, we could not 
restrain the extravagance of our importations, nor could 
we derive a revenue from their excess. Devoid of 
national importance, we could not procure for our ex- 



SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 91 

ports a tolerable sale at foreign markets. Devoid of 
national credit, we saw our public securities melt in the 
hands of the holders, like snow before the sun. Devoid 
of national dignity, we could not, in some instances, per- 
form our treaties on our parts; and in other instances, 
we could neither obtain nor compel the performance of 
them on the part of others. Devoid of national energy, 
we could not carry into execution our own resolutions, 
decisions or laws." 

The individualist of to-day as of yesterday has missed 
his guess on this question of centralization. It is not 
stronger self-government, it is not national self-govern- 
ment we need fear just now, but the riot and anarchy 
prevailing over those areas where there is neither state 
nor national control and over which it is coolly proposed 
by Mr. Bryan, an exponent of individualism and state 
rights, that forty-eight popular majorities of "earnest 
men with unselfish purpose and controlled only for the 
public good will be able to agree" on such legislation 
as shall "preserve for the future the inheritance we have 
received from a bountiful Providence." 

The individualist is not only afraid of centralization, 
but, like his predecessors, he is afraid of the very prin- 
ciple of union and of national sovereignty. He hates 
unity per se. He hates nationality. He sees monarchy 
in cooperation and absolutism in an attempt to get 
together. Therefore, he is raising a hue and cry. The 
old noises which assailed the ears of Washington and 
Hamilton, and their patriotic confreres are prevailing 
in the market place to-day. The particularists and milli- 
ners are again abroad battering the Constitution of the 



92 THE NEW POLITICS 

United States. These conf users of opinion still live in 
a revolutionary world. Like Rip van Winkle, they have 
slept through years of progress, but unlike him they 
have not wakened. They consider the Declaration of 
Independence a living issue — on Fourths of July — and 
deny in practice the principles they eloquently maintain. 
They have not advanced beyond the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. They do not think politically in terms larger 
than a state and practically no larger than each man for 
himself. They fail to grasp the idea of nationality, and 
ignorantly or maliciously accuse of tyrannical and im- 
perialistic tendencies those who lean toward nationality' 
instead of state rights ; who believe, in short, in the possi- 
bility of a whole people governing itself. 

It is not quite clear whether the present confusion of 
the individualist of strong central control of national 
concerns with monarchical, imperialistic, and tyrannical 
tendencies is due to the incompetence of its advocates 
to understand the nature of true democracy, or whether 
it is a deliberate attempt to confuse the mind of the 
people for paltry partisan purposes. 

It is, however, as certain that there are a few left 
who still think of all government as extraneous and 
super-imposed, and consequently all government as an 
evil, as that their position is antiquated and inadequate 
to the demand of an intelligent democracy. 

This fear and hatred of government, this confusion 
of liberty with license, this leaning toward the unre- 
strained impulse of savage man, this jealousy of construc- 
tive reason and of orderly life, constitute the faith of the 
eighteenth, not the twentieth, century. It is the old revo- 



SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 93 

lutionary spirit of rebellion against government qua gov- 
ernment, when the idea was inconceivable to the masses of 
the people that government was the articulation of a 
united and free people attuned to the constructive ideas 
of synthesis, cohesion, organization, as opposed to the 
destructive idea of atomism, anarchy, and strife. 

The sinister hatred of the Jeffersonians for Union and 
National Government was due partly at first to hatred of 
monarchy, partly to provincial habits of mind, and partly 
to a love of particularism and all it stood for as expressed 
in State Rights. But this soon passed to a party slogan 
and a partisan desire to discredit Washington and Ham- 
ilton. While Jefferson was pleading for a "little rebellion 
now and then" to clear the atmosphere, and Shays's 
Rebellion and the Whisky Insurrection were weather 
vanes of the prevailing spirit, Washington was complain- 
ing of the "combustibles in every state which a spark 
might set fire to." He spoke of the disorders of the 
rampant individualism of the States, and cried, "Good 
God, who, besides a Tory, could have foreseen, or a 
Briton predicted, them." During these days Washington 
wrote that "Even respectable characters" were talking 
without horror of monarchy, and Hamilton was writing 
for a "Strong Coercive Union." 

Now, then, the Democrats (I mean, of course, their 
predecessors, the Jeffersonian Republicans) believed in 
nothing coercive, much less a Union, especially a strong 
one. Coercion, even self-coercion, was pernicious and 
hateful to the individualist who believed in the individual 
doing as he pleased. It was, therefore, tyrannical. And 
tyranny of course was monarchy. From this point they 



94 THE NEW POLITICS 

attacked Washington and Hamilton, and rung all the 
changes in "associating the quality of strength in Gov- 
ernment with the idea of a despot," which was synony- 
mous with coercion. This tnotif, with all its variations, 
has been harped on until this day. Neither Jefferson nor 
his followers believed treason of Washington or Hamil- 
ton, nor is it credible to-day that his successors believe 
what they say of modern nationalism. 

If the presence of a common peril in the War of the 
Revolution had been scarcely able to preserve the 
semblance of Union, and if Civil War so nearly prevailed 
at the time of the war with Britain, how little cohesive 
force would remain when that pressure was removed? 
As Hamilton predicted, so it happened. Little minds pre- 
ternaturally swollen with the all-prevailing phrases of 
"Natural rights" unanchored to corresponding duties, 
hardened their hearts to the prophetic voices of Wash- 
ington and Hamilton and Jay. 

Each chesty individual unit enlisted in the common 
cause — about the only common cause — of the deification 
of selfishness and the apotheosis of mediocrity. This 
spirit of individualism was manifested in the states which 
established thirteen tariffs and came nearly organizing 
thirteen standing armies. Two states arose in rebellion 
and war seemed inevitable between Vermont, New 
Hampshire, and New York, between Pennsylvania and 
Connecticut. Petty interests, without national spirit 
and patriotism, led to strife, and strife led to hatred and 
the desire for a common defense until it soon became 
clear to every man of vision that the Confederation was 
fit for the purposes of neither war nor peace. 



SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 95 

When the war was over, it was only a farsighted few 
who saw that the real crisis had begun. The Confedera- 
tion had been nothing but a "league of friendship" for a 
common defense, superseding the Continental Congress 
under which the war had been prosecuted, and its ineffi- 
ciency during the last two years and six months of the 
war, and the years following till the adoption of the 
Constitution, gave Washington some provocation to say 
with pardonable bitterness that "Influence is not Govern- 
ment" And no one knew better than he what he had 
put on record of the miserable makeshift of the Govern- 
ment of the Confederation, that the war would have 
ended sooner, and would have cost less in blood and 
money, had the Government possessed merely the power 
of taxation. 

To those who look back from this vantage ground of 
experience, it seems nothing less than monstrous that 
the issues of war and peace should have had no other 
sanction than the sentiments of honor of men who pro- 
ceeded at once to the selfish repudiation of a national 
debt by ingrates, whose behavior can never be erased 
from the page of our history, but which has been partly 
redeemed by Washington, without whose single and in- 
comparable character the war could not have been won; 
and by Hamilton, without whose daring campaign for 
the national honor, for an adequate central and national 
Government, the American Union would never have been 
achieved. 

When the Father of his Country first took the oath of 
office as President of the new nation, with a standing 
army of 80 men, without a shilling in the treasury, with 



96 THE NEW POLITICS 

scarcely a rag of central government to cover the nation's 
nakedness, with the patriotic army, whose bloody feet 
had stained the snows of Valley Forge, clamoring for 
the paltry stipend a nation of ingrates was ready to 
repudiate; when the Jeffersonian individualists were 
marshaling all the hosts of confusion and lawlessness 
and revolt, this superb character, who had led his country- 
men through Revolution and Confederation, with Ham- 
ilton at his side, fought another war and won it. He 
carried his country through a third crisis, preserved his 
government from disintegration and his nation from 
dissolution a third time. 

There is something awe-inspiring in the ponderous 
inertia of this immobile figure, to whose unchanging 
and impregnable character a nation was anchored 
through three storms. 

It is perhaps too early to judge the living, but of the 
immortal names which have passed into our history, 
save Lincoln, there are three who have been indispen- 
sable to the nation, without any one of whom this 
nation would have been something different, perhaps 
no nation at all — perhaps now the discordant factions 
of helpless chance and prey to the organized races of 
mankind. 

Washington — Hamilton — Marshall — these three. No 
other among the dead or living will measure with them. 
Why? Because their lives were immortal protests 
against the individualism and anarchy of revolution; 
because they were architects and builders of a national 
self-government. 

Washington and Hamilton, for nearly a quarter 



SPIRIT OF JACOBINISM 97 

century, working side by side, and seeing eye to eye — 
our American Jove and Mercury his winged messenger 
— wrought what even Jefferson, State Rights, repudia- 
tion, secession, nullification and all the brood of indi- 
vidualism have failed to undo. 



BOOK II 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE COMMON 

GOOD 



99 



CHAPTER I 

POLITICS AND ETHICS 

We shall never get to the bottom of this question of 
American Politics without a more careful examination 
of its ethical aspects than any of us have seemed to be 
willing hitherto to give to it. American Politics is founded 
on interests, not principles. In municipal, state, or 
national concerns the most superficial observer will not 
fail to see that the prevailing motive is not the public 
good, but individual self-interest. There is an indescrib- 
able pathos in the spectacle of a whole people which 
might be a great people, working from such despicable 
motives as each one for his own self-aggrandizement. 
This is not so much the fault of the American people 
themselves as of their philosophy of life. Because the 
American Government was in a way the first fruit of 
the revolutionary ideas of the eighteenth century, in 
ethics, politics, and political economy, to say nothing of 
religion, everything everywhere became simply the ex- 
pression of the creed of revolution and revolt. The pre- 
vailing creed of individualism swept away the founda- 
tions of ethics in the destruction of an altruistic motive, 
although, of course, it is unnecessary to say it was not 
blotted out from human life. But it offered an ethics, so 
called, whose only motive is self-interest. The ultimate 
appeal of our morality was to selfishness. Even the 
utilitarians, who offered more or less of a humanitarian 
creed, placed it on selfish foundations, and no matter 

IOI 



102 THE NEW POLITICS 

what good may have come from it, that good has been 
incidental, for Locke and Hobbes, Adam Smith and 
Thomas Jefferson, Rousseau and Bentham, Godwin and 
James Mill and their kind have saddled a curse upon 
future generations in framing a philosophy which justi- 
fies a man's selfishness to himself — in translating 
Machiavellianism into modern life. 

There is a growing conviction among an increasing 
number of men that our politics must be a part of our 
ethics. They protest "against the breaking up into frac- 
tions of human unity and demand its restitution." We 
can no longer tolerate theories which separate ethics 
from politics. 

Twentieth century politics must involve a considera- 
tion of the spiritual element in man, and in this the 
materialisms of both individualism and socialism fall 
short. The fact is that humanity begins in association, 
is inconceivable without association, and association is 
founded in spirit. Juxtaposition is not all there is to it. 
That men are social, and not merely gregarious, makes 
a state possible. They are social within a large area, 
which we may call the common good, and this is a 
rational whole toward which each human atom bends his 
will, submits to, obeys, as it were, adopts, and finds vol- 
untary satisfaction in ; and this is the basis of that which 
distinguishes civilized and savage man. 

"My dominion ends," said Napoleon, "where the 
dominion of conscience begins." There is an ominous sug- 
gestion in the awful ambiguity of this phrase. That a 
line can be drawn just here — where politics ends and 
where conscience begins — is sufficiently suggestive. That 



POLITICS AND ETHICS 103 

it has been drawn in the separation of ethics from poli- 
tics is one of the most overwhelming calamities which 
have overtaken humanity. 

There can be no doubt but one of the greatest forces 
for good in the whole revolutionary period was that 
strange reformer whose ethical creed and moral purpose 
were at such cross purposes with each other through a 
long and useful life. The opening words of Jeremy 
Bentham's Principles of Legislation are: "The public 
good ought to be the object of the legislator; general 
utility ought to be the foundation of his reasoning." 
Again he says: "Nature has placed man under the em- 
pire of pleasure and pain. We owe to them all our ideas ; 
we refer to them all our judgments, and all the deter- 
minations of our life . . . the principle of utility sub- 
jects everything to these two motives. ... It expresses 
the property or tendency of a thing to prevent some 
evil or to procure some good. Evil is pain, or the cause 
of pain. Good is pleasure, or the cause of pleasure. ... 
He who adopts the principle of utility esteems virtue to 
be good only on account of the pleasures which result 
from it. He regards vice as an evil only because of the 
pains which it produces. Moral good is good only by 
its tendency to produce physical good. Moral evil is 
evil only by its tendency to produce physical evil." 

Bentham does compromise with an anti-materialism 
by stating further that when he says physical he 
means the pains and pleasures of the soul (which I 
believe he practically denies) as well as the pains and 
pleasures of the senses. He states further that all the 
virtues or their opposites, whatever we might call them, 



104 THE NEW POLITICS 

are to be classified under the category of pleasure or 
pain, and that pleasure or pain is what everybody feels 
to be such, peasant or prince, without consulting Plato 
or Aristotle. In chapter five he says also, "It is true that 
Epicurus alone of all the ancients had the merit of hav- 
ing known the true source of morals." 

Here in these bald, I might say stark-naked state- 
ments are the foundations of the ethics of political 
individualism. They are perfectly fair samples of the 
aphorisms of the day which outlined a pretty conserva- 
tive individualism (because Bentham was among the 
Conservatives), as is seen by the keynote struck in his 
first sentence in the Principles of Legislation — "The 
public good ought to be the object of the Legislator." 
Most of the individualists of that day denied pointblank 
that the end of the legislator was anything more than 
the protection of life and property from violence, and 
that to advance the public good was to violate the 
sacred principle of individual freedom. 

The reason the early individualists separated ethics 
from politics was because they destroyed ethics, by 
sweeping away the foundations of ethics, and, as in the 
case of Bentham himself, though mostly to a lesser de- 
gree, they would have destroyed politics in any sense 
except that of political opportunism had it not been for 
the ingrained and hereditary instincts and qualities over 
and above and better than their adopted creed in the Brit- 
ish stock. Bentham was an example of the man who is 
better than his creed. John Stuart Mill, "the saint of 
rationalism," is a better example still. 

But the fact remains that individualism was a dis- 



POLITICS AND ETHICS 105, 

integrating force, and left to itself was the negation of 
ethics and the destruction of the state with the exception 
of the policeman's office, which was only a compromise 
on the basis of its being a necessary evil. Mr. Leslie 
Stephen states this case pretty clearly (English Utili- 
tarians, p. 131): "A main characteristic of the whole 
social and political order, about 18 10, is what is now 
called 'individualism' ... or the gospel according to 
Adam Smith, laissez faire and so forth. . . . English- 
men took liberty mainly in the sense of restricting law. 
Government in general was a nuisance though a neces- 
sity; and properly employed only in mediating between 
conflicting interests and restraining the violence of in- 
dividuals forced into contact by outward circumstances. 
. . . The people would use their authority to tie the 
hands of the rulers and limit them strictly to their proper 
and narrow functions. The absence again of the idea 
of a state in any other sense implies another tendency. 
The 'idea' was not required. Englishmen were con- 
cerned rather with details than with first principles" (p. 

Mr. Stephen speaks further, with some refined scorn,, 
of the French who had their political theories all worked 
out, but which fell flat on the English mind. 

Both were wrong. The English despised political phi- 
losophy because this involved ethics and ethics annihi- 
lated the laissez faire regime, and the laissez faire regime 
was necessary for the rich that they might become richer. 
The French, apparently oblivious to the testimonies of 
history and the fundamental assumptions of scientific 
criticism and the inductive reasoning generally, seemed 



106 THE NEW POLITICS 

to spin their theories like spiders' webs from their own 
mouths. 

Dr. Pringle-Pattison sums up Benthamism in the fol- 
lowing words : "The abstract simplicity of the perfect 
state corresponds to the abstract simplicity of the philo- 
sophical principles from which it was deduced. Un- 
adulterated selfishness is the motive, universal benevo- 
lence is the end — these are the two fixed poles of 
Bentham's thought." 

There is no possible way of harmonizing principles 
so diametrically opposing each other, except in the per- 
sonal character of Bentham himself. Unfortunately 
there is a very small minority of the human race who 
can seek universal benevolence as the end of their lives 
with unadulterated selfishness as the motive of their 
endeavors. There can be no doubt that vast good has 
resulted to the human race through the efforts of the 
school which Bentham founded, notwithstanding the 
ethical atomism on which it was based. It was not 
necessary to reconcile benevolence to selfishness in their 
theoretical bearings when, in the personal character of 
Bentham and the two Mills and their following, it was 
quite certain that their chief end and aim were benevo- 
lent, but where it is not certain that their motive was 
selfishness. Perhaps after all too much credit has been 
given to Bentham and his school for the humani- 
tarian awakening of the first part of the nineteenth 
century, and too little to men like Southey, Wordsworth, 
and Coleridge, and especially Wesley, who perhaps had 
more to do with the awakening of the individual in 
bringing it to a consciousness of itself than any one force 



POLITICS AND ETHICS 107 

in the British nation in his century. After all, eighteenth 
century thought involved more than anything else the 
principle of analysis, and this was both cause and effect 
of individualism. The individualists, and even the utili- 
tarians for the most part, did not, because they consist- 
ently could not support the great measures for the 
public good, and in this they followed their ethical 
motives of unadulterated selfishness rather than the end 
of universal benevolence. "Some of the utilitarians, 
it is true," says Dr. Pringle-Pattison (Quarterly Review, 
July, 1901), "were better than their creed and supported 
the factory legislation, but the school was opposed to 
it on principle. The utilitarians were in fact . . . the 
chief elaborators of the classical political economy and 
they accepted its doctrines, not as abstractions and laws 
of tendency, provisionally true in given circumstances, 
but as an absolute theory of society." 

One is duly astonished, therefore, when he sees so 
able a scholar and so careful a historian as Professor 
Dicey claiming for individualism the results of the legis- 
lative reforms of England in the nineteenth century. 
Had he made this claim for utilitarianism he might at 
least have found sufficient footing to justify an attempt 
at an argument. As a matter of fact, individualism itself 
was sterile. It was negative, critical, destructive. It 
was not, and could not have been, and can never be, con- 
structive, to say nothing of architectonic. 

Mr. Dicey says, in Law and Opinion in England 
(Harvard Lectures) : "During the long conflicts which 
have made up the constitutional history of England 
individualism has meant hatred of the arbitrary pre- 



108 THE NEW POLITICS 

rogative of the crown; or in other words of the collec- 
tive and autocratic authority of the state. . . . The 
strength of Benthamism lay then ... in its being a 
response to the needs of a particular era." 

The fact is, that Bentham was true to an ethical pur- 
pose and was not consistent with the unethical motive 
he solemnly announced. He was bitterly opposed to 
anything like pure individualism; so much so that 
of all his generation he was one of the most caustic 
critics of the Declaration of Independence and the Dec- 
laration of Rights. The first of these he called a "hodge- 
podge of confusion and absurdity." Of the second he 
writes, "What has been the object of the Declaration of 
pretended Rights? To add as much force as possible 
to those passions already too strong, to burst the cords 
that hold them in ... to say to the selfish passions — 
there everywhere is your prey ! To the angry passions — 
there everywhere is your enemy!" 

The philosophical radicals of the nineteenth century 
were for the most part very able and very earnest men ; 
men of the highest moral characters, and in their charac- 
ters perhaps the flower of their age, notwithstanding 
their professions of "unadulterated selfishness." They 
were individualists so far as individualism served their 
purpose. As Professor Dicey says, their creeds served "a 
particular era." "It was, indeed, needed for a period," 
and was used "for a period" in its "hatred of the arbi- 
trary prerogative of the crown," or "the collective and 
autocratic authority of the state." Utilitarianism found 
that it had no raison d'etre as an exponent of mere in- 
dividualism, and in order to secure the vitality which 



POLITICS AND ETHICS 109 

could allow it to exist at all, and do an ethical work, it 
took on a social and altruistic form. About all of con- 
structive ethical value utilitarianism has bequeathed to 
history has been that in which it has exceeded the motive 
of individualism and its outlook. It is a matter of com- 
ment that the learned Professor should have overlooked 
these facts; that the individualistic protest against auto- 
cratic and irresponsible monarchy having gained its point, 
which was a purely negative one, must take up a posi- 
tive and constructive and social issue in direct departure 
from the principle of individualism, or go out of busi- 
ness. It added to the creed of individual happiness an 
article on national well-being; in other words, the public 
good. For has not Bentham surrendered the whole of 
the position of individualism in this very criticism of 
the Declaration of Rights : "The things that people stand 
most in need of are, one would think, their duties; for 
their rights, whatever they may be, are apt enough to 
take care of themselves . . . the great enemies of the 
public peace are the selfish and dis-social passions." 

Professor Dicey was not unaware of this arraignment 
of the principles of individualism, for I have quoted it 
from his Harvard Lectures. 

It is a most interesting study to follow out Professor 
Dicey's confusion, in his development of the four objects 
at which Benthamism was aimed; the transference of 
political power into hands friendly to the greatest good 
of the greatest number; the promotion of humanitarian- 
ism; the extension of individual liberty; the creation of 
an adequate legal machinery for the protection of the 
equal rights of all citizens. 



no THE NEW POLITICS 

The Reform act gave predominant authority to the 
middle classes of England. The Municipal Reform Act 
of 1836 gave to the inhabitants of boroughs the govern- 
ment and management of the cities in which they lived, 
doing nothing for country laborers. The new Poor 
Law, in placing poor relief under the supervision of the 
state, inaugurated a precedent in socialistic legislation 
which had not only not been exceeded but not even re- 
peated in the history of American or English law. 

The mitigation of the criminal law of England; the 
abolition of the pillory, of the whipping of women, of 
hanging in chains, the inauguration of prison reform 
and reduction of capital punishment, the adoption 
of laws regulating child labor, protecting lunatics 
and preventing sane men from imprisonment in mad 
houses; laws for the prevention of cruelty to animals, 
the emancipation of negroes; not one of these laws 
can be said to have been enacted from an individualistic 
but plainly all are from altruistic motives, and all are 
departures from the principles of the political theories 
of individualism which inveighs against all legislation 
and says in the language of Lord Brougham, "Why 
can't you let us alone?" 

So with legislation for individual freedom. It was 
altruistic. It was not individualistic even here on its 
own ground. Most curiously and naively Professor 
Dicey states the case: "By the legislation of 1824 Ben- 
thamites and Economists — that is, enlightened individ- 
ualists — had extended the right of combination in order 
to enlarge the area of individual freedom" ; in which the 
whole argument for individualism is given away ; and in 



POLITICS AND ETHICS in 

which is stated the fundamental principle of society, for 
real liberty is not found in the extension of the principles 
of irresponsible individual freedom, but through rational 
forms of association. And this is flat denial of indi- 
vidualism. 

I am the last one to discount the tremendous value of 
the Benthamite passion to protect individual freedom, 
but I am one of the first to protest that its wonderful 
progress in the nineteenth century and the splendid 
partial success it achieved is due to its departure from 
the spirit and methods of individualism; for they were 
obliged, as all rational legislators are obliged, "to extend 
the right of combination" — or the principle of associa- 
tion — "in order to enlarge the area of individual free- 
dom." 

In admitting the value of the fourth principle of 
Benthamism, the creation of legal machinery for promot- 
ing the common good, Professor Dicey again surrenders 
the ground-work of individualism. 

"What man out of Bedlam," says Professor Dicey, 
"ever dreamed that a country was happier for the constant 
recurrence of pestilence, famine, and war; but who, 
then, can deny that laws which promote the cultivation 
of the soil, insure the public health, keep the country 
at peace and avert invasions are, as far as they go, good 
laws?" 

Professor Dicey says, "The age of individualism was 
emphatically the era of humanitarianism." 

To say that "the age of individualism" and the "era 
of humanitarianism" were merely coincident would be 
an accurate statement. But to argue post hoc ergo proc- 



H2 THE NEW POLITICS 

ter hoc is unseemly of so able a scholar, lawyer, and 
historian. The factory legislation which followed the 
agitation started by Oastler's "Slavery in Yorkshire" in 
one of the most frightful arraignments of individualism 
ever written until the blue books took up the subject, 
was a half century protest against the hell individual- 
ism had made. The learned Professor speaks correctly 
when he says that "individualists of every school were 
only too keenly alive to the danger that the sinister 
interest of a class should work evil to the weak and help- 
less." But he is not accurate when he says that there 
was "nothing in the early factory movement which was 
opposed to Benthamism or to the doctrine of the most 
rigid political economy." Here Professor Dicey is the 
advocate framing an apologia for individualism. No 
one knows better than he that the orthodox political 
economy of the time was individualistic — and that so 
far as it was individualistic, its policy was laissez faire 
free competition between economic men — a free-for-all 
race against the field. This, of course, is not to say but 
most individualists even in those dreadful days exceeded 
individualism, and were better than their creed. 

But it is to say most emphatically that the wrath of 
an angered people which arose in England and placed 
the gyves of altruistic enactment on the wrists of the 
child-murderers of Manchester was a wrath of altruism 
— of the fear of God and the love of man — which cursed 
the reckless and irresponsible greed of individualism and 
said that the time had come to "grind the ravening tooth" 
of laissez faire. 

Many "individualists" at this time denounced the out- 



POLITICS AND ETHICS 113 

rages against the "little white slaves." It was Macaulay, 
the individualist, who wrote : "Moloch is a more merciful 
friend than Mammon. Death in the arms of the Cartha- 
ginian idol was mercy to the slow waste of life in the 
factories." 

Again the early individualists as they opened their 
hearts toward humanitarianism found there were certain 
persons after all whose interests needed safeguarding; 
i. e., who in the strictest sense were unable to protect them- 
selves and needed the special aid or protection of the state, 
and they found it necessary to any rational theory of 
civilization to restrict freedom of contract. Such legisla- 
tion as protects women and children and even tenant farm- 
ers; as defends society against poison foods and medi- 
cines; as will not allow a man under necessity or pres- 
sure to bargain away his rights, could not, although the 
custom of Benthamite reform agitation, be called indi- 
vidualistic legislation. Mr. Dicey says, "The most 
thoroughgoing Benthamites strenuously insist upon 
the principle that for certain purposes all persons need 
state protection; e. g., for the prevention of assault done 
to them by the breaker of a contract or by a wrong- 
doer." This is a summary of the aims of individualistic 
jurisprudence. Real consistent individualists like God- 
win insisted that "all law is an institution of the most 
pernicious tendency." They had retreated so far into 
the bat-inhabited caverns of anarchy that a modified 
individualist like Leslie Stephen speaks of Godwin's 
conception of mankind as a "vast number of incarnate 
syllogisms." 

Professor Dicey, in apologizing for the existence of 



ii 4 THE NEW POLITICS 

any law at all, says, "But such protection, or state aid, 
as understood by consistent individualists, is in reality 
nothing but the defense of individual liberty and is there- 
fore not an exception to but an application of the indi- 
vidualistic creed." 

I wonder if Professor Dicey, who has admitted that 
the principle of association enlarges the area of indi- 
vidual freedom, will deny in the interests of individual 
liberty the wisdom of the extension of the principle of 
association and the "utility" of such legislation as ex- 
tends it. Moreover, another question would be perti- 
nent here. Is individual liberty the sum total of human 
good? Are there no other, no higher aims for human 
endeavor? Must jurisprudence and politics stand or 
fall as they are measured by this norm ? Is it individual 
liberty for each man to do as he pleases? Does human 
perfection lie toward the "greatest happiness" of Ben- 
tham or the "greatest nobleness" of Carlyle? 

Toward pure individual liberty lies license. Toward 
constitutional liberty lies discipline. 

Under the old regime the individual awakened. But 
he awakened only to individuality — not through indi- 
vidualism, but through the discovery that the individual 
is developed and perfected only in and through rational 
association. 

If the strong ethical bias of the characters of such 
men as Bentham, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson, 
and indeed most all the better sort of the leaders of the 
revolutionary movement who spent their lives in really 
trying to work out the betterment of mankind, started 
a real liberating and rejuvenating movement during the 



POLITICS AND ETHICS 115 

revolutionary age, it also may be true that the utili- 
tarian propaganda based on an egoistic philosophy will 
result eventually in more harm to the human race than 
it ever has done good. There has been no single year 
out of these one hundred and thirty-five years since 
Jefferson and Smith and Bentham burst upon the world 
which has been without its witness to the fact that there 
is something fundamental in human nature which prompts 
its best productions to do noble acts without value 
received and to perform heroic deeds without counting 
the cost. The profound and far-reaching harm which 
the philosophy of these men has done and is doing and 
will continue to do is in offering a political and economic 
philosophy founded on an ethics that justifies a man's 
selfishness to himself. 



CHAPTER II 

THE GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 

The New Politics presents a theory of the state of 
wider scope than the mere protection of life and prop- 
erty, and for the rest, the big eating the little. It offers 
a theory comprehensive enough to cover the whole wel- 
fare of all the people. Its creed is that progress is 
planned and wrought, that it is no chance flower in the 
Micawberish garden of laissez faire. 

The relations established between men in the institu- 
tions of the state while not of the high-water mark, 
define pretty well the average level of national morality 
and capacity for reason. They define the element in 
common between the individuals of the nation, viz., 
nationality. The relations outlined by a civic com- 
munity are not only the embodiment of the moral ca- 
pacity of the nation, but are the absolutely necessary 
means or channels of fulfillment of the moral life of the 
nation, without which manhood itself would be stripped 
of its distinctive function and attributes. The state is, 
as it were, the composite ethical portrait of the national 
rational character. Idiosyncrasies eliminated, there is 
a large common area. Here is the nub of the whole 
question of politics: This very idea of a common good 
and the fact of a common good involve by inexorable 
logical necessity duties as well as rights ; and conversely 
any rational theory of rights and duties involves (what a 
theory of rights denies or omits) this common interest, 

116 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 117 

this common aim and life, this common good where lies 
the state. 

"People are beginning to recognize," says Michel 
Chevalier (quoted by Paul Leroy-Beaulieu, Modern 
State, p, 17), that the function of the state "is to guide 
society toward good and preserve it from evil, to be 
the active and intelligent promoter of public improve- 
ment." The same principle is recognized by Professor 
Wagner of Berlin when he places alongside the mission 
of justice another great function of state, the mis- 
sion of civilization (Culturzweck des Staats). Says 
Shebbare (The Greek Theory of the State), "The two 
great rival theories of the functions of the state are — 
the theory which was for so many years dominant in 
England, and which may for convenience be called the 
individualist theory, and the theory which is stated most 
fully and powerfully by the Greek philosophers which 
we may call the socialist theory. The individualist 
theory regards the state as a purely utilitarian institu- 
tion, a mere means to an end . . . for the protection 
of property and personal liberty, and as having therefore 
no concern with the private life and character of the 
citizen, except in so far as those may make him dan- 
gerous to the material welfare of his neighbor. 

"The Greek theory, on the other hand, though it like- 
wise regards the state as a means to certain ends, regards 
it as something more. . . . According to this theory 
no department of life is outside the scope of politics, 
and a healthy state is at once the end at which the 
science aims, and the engine by which its decrees are 
carried out." 



n8 THE NEW POLITICS 

The use of the term "socialist theory" is very mis- 
leading, because that vast body of social and ethical 
doctrine which is pretty well known among scholars as 
the Greek theory of the state cannot in any sense be 
identified with the orthodox socialism of the present day 
whose foundations are laid in the economic material- 
ism of Karl Marx. The individualist theory of the 
state, however, on the American continent is the "police- 
man theory" of Jefferson and his school. This and the 
American socialist theory are both fundamentally dif- 
ferent from another theory which cannot by any twist- 
ing be called by either name. It did not start as a 
political philosophy. It did not start as a theory of 
state. It was the creation of necessity. It came into 
being as a theory because it was a growth of the ethical 
and political wisdom of the best minds of the early 
republic to protect the republic from dissolution. It 
has been wrought out of over a century of experience 
of a nation justifying itself and its right to live. 

"Whoever," says Guizot (History of Civilization), 
"observes with some degree of attention the genius of 
the English nation" (and he could have included the 
American nation, for it is an Anglo-Saxon characteristic) 
"will be struck with a double fact; on the one hand, its 
steady good sense and practical ability; on the other, 
its want of general ideas and of elevation of thought 
upon theoretical questions. Whether we open an English 
work on history, jurisprudence, or any other subject, 
we rarely find the great and fundamental reason of 
things." 

It is no disparagement of the power of finding the 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 119 

"great and fundamental reason of things" to say that 
on the whole the practical and empirical method of the 
Anglo-Saxon with his conservative instinct has had bet- 
ter results than the more philosophical method of, for 
example, France. For without a Reign of Terror con- 
servative Britain has achieved more liberty under freer 
institutions than have the French, and that without the 
guillotine of Robespierre, which made way for the sword 
of Napoleon the Great, which in turn determined the 
day of wrath for France and Napoleon the Little at 
Sedan. 

One of the curious paradoxes of political progress is 
that the doctrinaires have not been the ones who have 
created rational and ethical institutions. Jacobin doc- 
trinaires become the ancestors of anarchy. The sensible, 
practical, concrete Washington fathers a nation. 

That the state has an ethical nature and a moral mis- 
sion is an idea as foreign to individualism as that the 
individual is not the final reality. But the ethical nature 
of the state first came within the point of view of the 
Greeks. How out of the limited area of political history 
behind them this gifted people were able to pluck torches 
to light all succeeding ages will never cease to provoke 
the wonder of mankind. 

But even they did not know the values of their Con- 
stitutions, for was not the Politics of Aristotle unnoticed 
by his contemporaries, and was it not hidden in a cellar 
in Skepsis and found and published in the days of Sylla 
by Appellikon of Teos? 

It is less likely that the modern publisher would buy 
that manuscript or could sell that book which is to 



120 THE NEW POLITICS 

move future ages than that it is nailed away somewhere 
— an "Attic Philosophy" — in a box labeled "Mumm's 
Extra Dry." 

The politics we have been looking forward to as 
worthy the Western Hemisphere in future times must 
evolve on rational, not hit-or miss, lines; and it must 
reckon with those two great contributions of human 
spirit, the Greek form and Christian content. 

The peculiar contribution of the Greeks, without 
which it is impossible to conceive of the future of human 
thought or human progress, is that this universe of ours 
is not a laissez faire universe, that the world has not 
been abandoned to caprice, but that Reason rules the 
World and Men. 

The late Professor Drummond has described a book 
he read in his childhood called The Chance World. It 
described a world in which everything happened by 
chance. The sun might rise, or it might not, or it might 
appear at any hour, or the moon might come up instead. 
When children were born they might have one or a 
dozen heads, and those heads might not be on their 
shoulders — there might be no shoulders — but arranged 
about their limbs. If one jumped up in the air, it was im- 
possible to predict whether he would ever come down 
again. In this chance world cause and effect were abol- 
ished. Law was annihilated. And the result to such 
a world could only be that Reason would be impossible. 
It would be a lunatic world with a population of lunatics. 

Now this is no more than a real picture of what the 
world would be without law or the universe without 
continuity. 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 12 r 

This idea, the Greeks, the first of all men, discovered, 
and the first — would it be too much to say the last — of 
all men, applied to Politics. It was impossible for them 
to dissociate this idea from that of justice, for justice 
is rational. We find, therefore, in the prose and poetic 
literature of the Greeks, the reiterated proclamation that 
just relations must be maintained between men, because 
just relations are rational relations. Here the individ- 
ualist spirit was found to be irrational and here altruism 
first found rational and irrefragible foundations. 

Greece has given us the doctrine that Logos, or Reason, 
rules the world — a doctrine first promulgated to man- 
kind by Anaxagoras, who appeared, as Aristotle says, 
"as a sober man among the drunken." From him began 
the first great systematic protest against individualism. 
When the Greeks first began to distinguish between 
nature and culture, Barbarian and Greek, they developed 
and explained their ideas in the growth of the mind 
from individualism to the larger life of rational ethics. 
Their contrast between Greek and Barbarian was based 
on the distinction between socialized and individualistic 
society. This idea began to dawn upon their thinkers 
at a very early time, long before the age of Anaxagoras, 
and has always been closely associated with justice and 
altruistic spirit. Even in days as early as those at Chal- 
cis and Euboea, when Hesiod is said to have striven with 
Homer and won, this former poet entered the lists of 
justice and good faith against the misuse of power. It 
was he who wrote the first fable of its kind in all 
European literature and elucidated the hawk's theory 
that "might makes right." A hawk was soaring in the 



122 THE NEW POLITICS 

clouds with a nightingale in its talons. Transfixed 
by the cruel claws, the suffering songster cried out in 
pain. "Silly creature," said the hawk, "why dost 
thou scream? Thou art in the grasp of the stronger. 
Thou shalt go wherever I take thee, songster as thou 
art. I will make a meal of thee, if I please, or I will 
let thee fall. It is folly to think of striving against one's 
betters." 

Thus early in the first dim day's dawn of the authentic 
records of European mind, the first fable in European 
literature pictures the "divine" law of the "survival of 
the fittest" — unrestricted competition — laissez faire — 
— individualism — when the claw instinct for a mouthful 
quenched the voice of song. Those must have been 
"human" days, as we have learned to connote "human," 
for Hesiod saw that around him which called for this 
fable — as true to-day — and he uttered a lament which 
a singer (if we had one) might utter to-day. "Would 
that I had died earlier, or that my birth had fallen on 
later days, for now there is a race of iron." 

Would it have fared him better to have had his chance 
now, nearly three thousand years later, and have been 
born to a race of steel? 

"The evils of Athens are due not to the gods but men. 
The leaders of the people, the nobles, are possessed by 
an insatiable love of riches, and do not shrink from 
injustice to acquire wealth," quoth Solon, a statesman 
whose poetry was but a commentary on his own emanci- 
pating career. "I have framed laws," he says, "securing 
justice for the humble and the miserable, dispensing to 
all a just equity." In his poem on Salamis, he says, 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 123 

"Disdain of law has filled the state with evils. Where 
law reigns it produces order and harmony, and restrains 
the wicked. It smoothes the rough places, stifles pride, 
quenches violence, and nips misfortune in the bud. It 
straightens crooked ways, subdues haughtiness, and re- 
presses sedition. It tames the fury of baleful discord; 
and so men's affairs are brought into harmony and 
reason." 

Is there not kinship between these ideas, and that of 
the Sicilian in the eighty-fourth Olympiad, named Em- 
pedocles, who taught that Love is the creative and bind- 
ing principle in the universe, and that the separating, 
disintegrating force is Hate? who taught that the per- 
fect state of the earthly existence is Harmony and the 
imperfect state is Discord? that Love is the fountain, 
Hate the destructive principle of things? 

This is the underlying principle of the tragedies of 
^Eschylus, who began to interpret the old mythology 
in the light of a guiding Providence which rewards man 
according to his works. The spiritual world, according 
to yEschylus, as well as the natural world, is ruled by 
reason — where prevails law instead of anarchy. 

yEschylus and Aristophanes, and to a degree Sopho- 
cles and Euripides, were preachers of righteousness to 
a degenerating age. They failed to bring Athens to 
repentance because their message, brilliant as it was, 
could not much check the individualism and the tendency 
to anarchy and dissolution to which they were swiftly 
hastening. It was here that Socrates came — for the 
Greeks, too late, but for us, let us hope, not too soon. 
Socrates took up the principle of the control of Provi- 



124 THE NEW POLITICS 

dence (to say the same thing religiously), and made the 
first advance toward a comprehensive statement of the 
union of the concrete with the universal. Jesus took 
the second and final step, and future human thought 
on historic lines, at least, can make no progress outside 
the Greek form and the Christian content. For, as 
Hegel has said, "We affirm absolutely that nothing great 
in the world has been accomplished without passion. 
Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of an 
investigation, the first the idea, the second the complex 
of human passion; the one the warp, the other the 
woof of the vast arras-web of universal history. The 
concrete mean and union of the two is liberty, under 
the conditions of morality in a state." 

We must understand once for all — and this the Greeks 
have taught us in the splendor of their ideals and as 
truly in the tragedy of their history — that we did not 
somehow fall together without reason and without God. 
As no child ever grew to noble manhood following the 
blind paths of whim and impulse, so no great people ever 
developed on the hit-or-miss lack of plan and reason 
and mission — never will fulfill a noble destiny by a for- 
tuitous concourse of political atoms — cannot grow 
toward a divine humanity without reason and without 
God. This idea, before it came to its substantial per- 
fection, passed through three minds, which for power 
and breadth have never for a given space of time — if 
in all the spaces of time — been equaled in the recorded 
history of the world. 

Socrates, a true son of Zeus, found new and rational 
moral grounds for the being of the state and for politi- 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 125 

cal association in the principles of pure ethics, so broad 
and so reasonable that their immanent rationality has 
laid itself lovingly on intelligent and unselfish beings to 
this day. He parted with his predecessors when he left 
the standpoint of individualism and looked upon 
humanity as a whole and found in it that which dis- 
tinguished it from all other sentient creation — reason. 
Thus he arrived at the purely Greek idea in another and 
systematic way and placed it on a permanent foundation. 
He taught that in his very nature as a rational being 
man was intended for a social and political life, to which 
the individual may not place his will in opposition. His 
immortal pupil, Aristocles, whom they nicknamed Plato, 
because he had broad shoulders undertook the burden 
of systematizing the teachings of his master and if from 
all the splendid mass of his inspiring work we elimi- 
nate the Utopian and retain the ideal, we find his teach- 
ing reduced to this, that the adequate life worthy of 
man's estate is the life of reason as opposed to impulse. 
It is in the ideal state the ideal man is found, the state 
where the ideal of justice finds visible and concrete 
embodiment. Aristotle, pupil of Plato and tutor of 
Alexander, laid the idea on scientific foundations, and 
gave a new direction and a new content to the future 
political history of the world. 

In Aristotle, reason is the final arbiter of political life, 
and law becomes the vehicle of the public conscience, 
not something extraneous as a policeman with his club 
— for his was not the modern policeman theory of the 
state. He makes a fundamental distinction between 
those who obey the force behind the law and those who 



126 THE NEW POLITICS 

obey the reason within the law. The individualistic 
competitive conflict of human passions was as irrational 
to him as the will of an iron despotism claiming blind 
and sullen obedience. Law compelled society by its 
"sweet reasonableness," as Plato beautifully expresses it 
in the Crito, where the laws came in person to Socrates 
in prison — came to him not as jailers, but as his friends, 
counselors, coadjutors, and partners in all good. And 
so Aristotle says, "Men should not think it slavery to 
live according to the rule of the constitution, for it is 
their salvation." "It is evident," he says further, "that 
that government is best which is so established that 
every one therein may have it in his power to act virtu- 
ously and to live happily." Shall we with Plato con- 
ceive of the legislator as apxnenruv laying foundation 
and framework of a rational human society which is 
the "just man writ large," or with Aristotle, that the 
state not only exists for life, but for noble life, or J 
with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle in the ground idea 
common to all three that Politics involves knowledge of 
the highest good of man and means of the attainment 
of such values as are not monetary, but both human 
and divine? The conception that the state exists but to 
protect life and property never entered the mind of a 
rational Greek as an adequate content for a political 
philosophy. 

To the Greek the law which was recognized as binding 
upon all was in reason, not command. The law lay deep in 
the reason, and was the expression of that reason because 
it was adapted to the higher necessities of mankind. 
Without those laws which the Greek state threw around 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 127 

her citizens and which constituted the state in motion 
as it were, laws which were the results of political 
power limited only by the power of securing the good 
life for every citizen, it was conceived that the individual 
had no rights, nor had he the chance outside of the state 
of leading a rational life, and the rational life, according 
to Plato, is the life governed by reason as opposed to the 
one governed by impulse. 

Aristotle's Politics was a continuation of his work 
on Ethics. With him Politics and Ethics are one. They 
constitute two points of view of the same subject — ■ 
human association — at right angles as it were — each with 
the other. The true end of the individual and the true 
end of society are the same — the ultimate common good. 
Here he anticipated Christianity. 

The old Greek had a firm hold on an idea the modern 
world has forgotten or despised. We must come back 
to it before we can attain to a rational, that is to say, 
ethical Politics. 

The Greek understood that there are no rights without 
duties, no liberty without law ; and that both rights and 
duties imply a common interest, a common good, a 
common life. Moreover, they laid the foundation of 
politics when they founded the implications of rights and 
duties in a common good. An association which confers 
rights, imposes duties; and a departure from this 
principle of reciprocity, which is the underlying prin- 
ciple of true politics, leads to anarchy or absolutism. 
For to the individual as to the state, all rights and no 
duties is as dangerous as all duties and no rights. 

Aristotle, Pol., I, ii, 9 : 



128 THE NEW POLITICS 

". . . Man is by nature a political animal. And he who 
by nature and not by accident is without a state, is either 
above humanity or below it; he is the . . . 'Tribeless, 
lawless, hearthless one/ whom Homer denounces — the 
outcast who is a child of war ; he may be compared to a 
bird which flies alone." 

Pol., I, ii, 14: 

"The proof that the state is a creation of nature and 
prior to the individual is that the individual when iso- 
lated is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part 
in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to live in 
society, or who has no need because he is sufficient to 
himself, must be either a beast or a god — he is no part 
of a state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by 
nature. . . . Man when perfected is the best of animals, 
but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst 
of all, since armed injustice is the most dangerous, and 
he is equipped with the arms of intelligence and with 
moral qualities which he may use for the worst ends. 
Therefore if he have not virtue he is the most unholy 
and the most savage of animals. . . . But justice is the 
bond of men in states and ... is the principle of order 
in political society. 

Pol., VII, 1: 

"He who would inquire about the best form of a state 
ought first to determine which is the most eligible life." 

Pol, VII, i, 14: 

"Let us assume that the best life both for individuals 
and states is the life of virtue, having eternal goods 
enough for the performance of good actions." 

Pol., VII, ii, 5 : 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 129 

"Now it is evident that the form of government is best 
in which every man, whoever he is, can act for the best 
and live happily." 

These splendid and rational thinkers laid the rational 
foundations for a modern political instrument but half un- 
derstood and not half worked; an instrument which de- 
fines clearly its ethical, benevolent, and purposive mission 
— a mission behind and directing all the articles and all the 
amendments, all the meaning and all the purpose of the 
Constitution of the United States — "To promote the 
general welfare." 

While the political philosophy of the Greeks was for 
the most part historical and analytical instead of antici- 
patory and constructive, the age of Pericles and its prac- 
tical protest against individualism, in its art, its culture, 
its patriotism, laid the foundation for a national solution 
of political principles on a nobler scale than the world 
had ever known before. Observe, if you please, I am 
speaking of political theory, not practice — Politics, not 
political science. Socrates, in taking issue with the 
Sophists and their elaborate system of utilitarianism, for 
the first recorded time in the history of the world laid 
the foundation of an ethic which would include the 
whole field of Politics. Whatever may be said of the 
details of Plato's Utopianism, the main idea of the 
Republic is the necessity of organic unity in social and 
political life. "The just man is like a well-ordered city, 
the unjust man like anarchy," he declares. It will not 
be too great praise to ascribe to the pupil of Plato, so 
far as politics is concerned, the laurel of supremacy over 



130 THE NEW POLITICS 

all other members of the human race. Yet his works are 
hardly taught in an adequate way in a single school or 
college or university of the United States. The guid- 
ing principle in Aristotle's methods of thought is the 
rational choice of the mean between the extremes of 
conduct. In a discussion involving individualism vs. 
socialism, for example, he would have found in the golden 
mean a solution of the problem. 

It is the commonly accepted account of political phi- 
losophers that it is to Aristotle we are indebted for the 
"separation" of ethics and politics. To my mind this is 
owing to a most extraordinary lack of insight and per- 
haps to a lack of comprehension of what Aristotle was 
driving at, or it may have arisen from that all too 
common characteristic of the mind of man, which has 
been reading its Aristotle as those read their Bible 
whom Ruskin likened to the hedgehogs eating grapes 
by rolling over in them and eating those which stuck 
to their quills. 

Aristotle in the opening chapters of the Nicomachean 
Ethics seeks an end like the target of an archer, with 
reference to which he may study the question of ethics. 

"Now one would naturally suppose it to be the end of 
that which is most commanding and exclusive and to 
this description Politics plainly answers. ... It must 
include the Good of Man. And grant that this is the 
same to the individual and to the community, yet surely 
that of the latter is plainly greater and more perfect to 
discover and preserve; for to do this even for a single 
individual were a matter for contentment, but to do it 
for a whole nation . . . were more noble and godlike." 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 131 

His closing chapter in the Ethics is an introduction 
to the Politics, as his whole book is a preparation for 
that study. In the Nichomachean Ethics he considers the 
theory and in the Politics the practice of virtue. In 
this last chapter he asks if his original purpose is com- 
pleted. "Must we not acknowledge what is commonly 
said, that, in matters of moral action, mere speculation 
and knowledge is not the real End, but rather practice. 
. . . Now if talking and writing were to make men good, 
they would justly, as Theognis observes, have reaped 
numerous and great rewards. . . . Men such as these 
then what mere words can transform ? . . . We shall want 
laws on these points . . . respecting one's whole life, 
since the mass of men are amenable to compulsion 
rather than reason, and to punishment rather than a 
sense of honor. . . . The Lacedaemonian is nearly the 
only state in which the framer of the Constitution has 
made any provision, it would seem, respecting the food 
and manner of living of the people; in most states these 
points are entirely neglected, and each man lives just 
as he likes, ruling his wife and children Cyclops-fashion." 

Aristotle's idea of ethics was that it was all inclusive, 
and he would have indorsed Samuel Johnson's saying 
that it "is one of the studies which ought to begin with 
the first glimpse of reason and only end with life itself." 

Aristotle not only has not separated Ethics from Poli- 
tics, but it can fairly be doubted whether he ever clearly 
distinguished between the two. If it is meant that he 
viewed society from two points of view, the ethical and 
political, it cannot of course be denied. But that he 
found common ground — indeed, that he found the ground 



132 THE NEW POLITICS 

common, no student of Aristotle can successfully deny. 
He certainly distinguished between ethics and political 
science. Ethics and practical politics, studied retro- 
spectively and analytically, are certainly separated, for 
Aristotle in the examination of 158 ancient constitu- 
tions and forms of Government must analyze existing 
affairs and these never coincide with ideals of right. 
Ethics and practical political science must be separated. 
Thus Aristotle separated them. This misconception of 
Aristotle down to this day is that of those who mis- 
conceive politics and fail to distinguish between political 
science and politics or political philosophy — a failure 
common to many of the world authorities on the subject 
in and out of our great universities. Political science 
has to do with facts and is undisturbed by the intrusion 
or elimination of ethical values. Political science con- 
cerns itself with what is and what has been. Political 
philosophy or politics including this field also looks for- 
ward as well as backward and considers what ought 
to be. It is because our politics has ceased to consider 
what ought to be, that it has become something else than 
politics, for politics is a part of the philosophy of 
humanity, from which the ethical element cannot be 
eliminated. 

Let us therefore distinguish between the science and 
the Philosophy of Politics. Pure chemistry knows no 
ethical value, but when its compounds are considered 
from a wider point of view as poisons and foodstuffs, 
the ethical element enters. Science can give no adequate 
account of any phases of human affairs because ethical 
values are foreign to it. This is why the scientific 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 133 

account of life is inadequate and must call in philosophy. 
It is as helpless without philosophy as philosophy without 
science. 

Human conduct cannot be the subject of human con- 
sideration without regard to that simple and everlasting 
matter of right and wrong. Nor can it be considered 
outside or independent of political association. Aris- 
totle never wrote of human conduct without reference 
to both of these considerations. He never divided the 
field of speculation. He never "separated" them. He 
always insisted that they were one, as Plato and Socrates 
did before him. Aristotle closed his volume on the Nico- 
machean Ethics and wrote practically "To be continued 
in our next," and his next was his Politics. And through- 
out the whole of this monumental work which has had 
more influence on the Politics of mankind than any other 
book excepting the Bible, Aristotle develops the Ethical 
idea in Politics. He positively does not separate the two 
ideas in any fundamental sense. 

What Aristotle tried to portray in his Politics was the 
highest form of human association, such as would pro- 
duce the noblest form of human life. 

The state exists "not only for the sake of life, but 
for the noble life," etc. But even here the principle is 
recognized that the state exists for man, not man for the 
state, in a theory which involves an immanent Good. 
It involves also an adequate theory of humanity. 

The fundamental fault of American Politics and eco- 
nomics is that neither is based upon an adequate estimate 
of humanity. This shows itself nowhere more in both 
theory and practice than in the divorce of ethics from 



i 3 4 THE NEW POLITICS 

politics and economics, and of religion from life. A 
stranger need not walk far to find that from our scheme 
of values, confined largely to monetary standards, has 
arisen the "business theory of state," which was the 
theory of Bentham, the individualists of the Revolution 
and of the Jeffersonian democracy; the democracy of 
all rights and no duties. The puerile inadequacy of 
anything that might be named a political philosophy in 
this country will be seen in comparison with the im- 
mortal and yet forgotten conception of the Greeks over 
twenty centuries ago. 

Politics, then, is one aspect of human economics with 
special reference to good and evil. The protracted effort 
to separate politics and ethics cannot be reconciled with 
singleness of purpose and sanity of judgment. The 
responsibility for the initiative must not be borne by 
Aristotle, but be shared somehow between Machiavelli 
and Mephistopheles. 

Machiavelli is the exponent of the modern point of 
view. He succeeded in his emphasis of the doctrine 
that the end justifies the means in establishing from the 
individualist standpoint the doctrine which became the 
foundation of Jesuitism, modern politics and economics 
and the modern American political machine, including 
the engineer, viz., the "boss." Machiavelli's point of 
view is pure individualism in which ethics and politics 
are separated. 

Conceiving only an end to be gained and taking no 
account of morality, Machiavelli is the father of modern 
politics. Religion, morality — indeed, everything is but 
an instrument to secure the end. Self-interest is the only 



GREEK CONTRIBUTION TO POLITICS 135 

political interest of prince or state. In Machiavelli is 
the separation of politics and ethics complete. 

The individualist theory is that politics and political 
economy are identical. This is the "Business theory of 
the State." But it must be remembered that economics 
and political economy are two different things. Eco- 
nomics is the theory of wealth. Politics includes a 
theory of legislation as well as of the state with refer- 
ence to human welfare. Political economy is the political 
aspect of trade and industry. The politics of a true 
democracy includes a theory of the state in which good 
will, not antagonism, predominates — a theory of govern- 
ment of the people, by the people, and for the people, 
under a constitution which asserts our duties with our 
rights, "to promote the general welfare." This phrase 
of our constitution is the nearest approach in modern 
politics to the famous dictum of Aristotle, "The state 
exists not merely for life, but for the sake of the noble 
life," that we must hold political society together for 
the sake of honorable deeds, not for the sake of a joint 
livelihood, as the modern individualistic theory construes 
it as a bread and butter mutual insurance company. 

Pol., Bk. Ill, ix, 6 : 

"But a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not 
for the sake of life only; if life only were the object, 
slave and brute animals might form a state. . . . Nor 
does a state exist for the sake of alliance and security 
from injustice, nor yet for the sake of exchange and 
mutual intercourse. . . . Those who care for good 
government take into consideration virtue and vice in 
states. Whence it may be further inferred that virtue 



136 THE NEW POLITICS 

must be the serious care of a state which truly deserves 
the name, for without this ethical end the community 
becomes a mere alliance." 

Then Aristotle speaks scornfully of Lycophron the 
sophist, who seems to have held the modern democratic 
doctrine that the state is only a "machine for the protec- 
tion of life and property. ,, 



CHAPTER III 

PATERNALISM 

There is a certain pathos in that confusion of mind 
prevailing among many who are supposed to be think- 
ing people, regarding those ethical actions of the nation 
in recognition of the obligations it sustains to the indi- 
vidual whose duties it claims. If a certain legislation can 
be called "paternalism/' or "socialism," it is at once rele- 
gated to the limbo of the shockingly impossible, as if 
these two classifications (were they true ones, which they 
are not) would affect the value of — for example — 
national legislation against the microbe, which knows no 
state boundary lines, or board fences; or, for example, 
again, our "paternal" public school system. 

It is interesting to note the difference between the 
theorist and statesman. Von Humboldt was a radical. 
His conception of the state was in keeping with the pre- 
vailing idea of his age, acknowledging very narrow 
limits to the functions of the state ; i. e., as maintaining 
"security against both external enemies and internal dis- 
sensions" (Sphere and Duties of Government). He 
went so far as to condemn state education, but when he 
came to closer quarters with actual government he found 
that the best way to advance the intellectual equipment 
of the Prussian nation was in the establishment of 
state schools which he had condemned. He did not stop 
here, but extended further the scope and power of the 
state. 

137 



138 THE NEW POLITICS 

Herbert Spencer's theory of politics realized would 
result in the dissolution of the state. He even argues 
against public schools and education at the public ex- 
pense. Perhaps his views would have been modified 
had he been called to the administration of affairs. 

It would be very difficult, even in this laissez faire 
country, to find any formidable array of intelligence sup- 
porting the limited reasoning of the Economist, the late 
Professor Fawcett of Cambridge University, who was 
so opposed to the idea of state interference that he fought 
the principle of Nationalism as expressed in a public 
system, and opposed the support of public schools by 
the state, declaring that he was willing that the stigma of 
pauperism should cling to those who allowed the state to 
educate their children; because early in the last century 
the government poor laws had reduced to pauperism one 
in every four of the population of Great Britain. Our 
American common school system is not paternalism. 
It is not socialism. If it is either, then by all means 
let us have some more of whichever it is. 

I have often fancied the Congressional Library a 
public affront to the sensibilities of every downright in- 
dividualist who might wave his hand in wrath toward 
the Capitol for unjustly spending the money of people 
who cannot even read for such a building — such a pile 
of books and such an incomparable system as Mr. Put- 
nam's. "Let every man buy his own books," I hear him 
say, and as he looks further down the hill he will con- 
tinue: "Let every man study his own bugs and do his 
own sanitation. These paternalistic sanitations of ours 
are not consistent with my eighteenth century ideas." 



PATERNALISM 139 

There is a pathos in the muddleheadness of most 
of our "great men" on some of these elemental questions. 
I do not find in the speeches or writings of most of our 
American politicians evidence of a clear idea of the 
modification of the principle of state interference and 
state control, by the simple fact of democracy — the 
fact that all this kind of ethical legislation is voluntary, 
that is, self-imposed. It is not socialism, because it up- 
holds the dignity and freedom of the individual. It is 
not paternalism, because true democracy is fraternal- 
ism, not paternalism. The rational imposition of ethical 
legislation upon ourselves — the surrender of certain of 
our rights to the general welfare — this is the soul of the 
democracy of nationalism. There is no paternalism 
without a pater. 

To speak of paternalism under self-government is 
to publish a puzzleheadness quite truly American. To 
speak of it with feeling is a pathetic admission of label 
and livery in the service of some predatory cave-dwellers 
of individualism, whose usurped precincts are full of 
pirated goods in danger of some impending ethical 
Nemesis. Paternalism is impossible under self-govern- 
ment. It is only possible under a government of ruler 
and subjects. That this distinction has not been made 
is because we have failed to distinguish between those 
forms of government which for thousands of years have 
meant forcible control by power foreign to the will and 
interests and sentiments of the people and a form of 
government of the people, by the people, and for the 
people. 

A concrete illustration of what I mean will be found 



140 THE NEW POLITICS 

in a comparison of state interference under a monarchy 
and a democracy. In Germany paternalism in the form, 
e. g., of government ownership of railroads, means that 
the railroads have been taken away from the people and 
practically given to the Emperor. The railroad is a 
part of the political machine, if you please, a part of the 
military machine — practically controlled by one man — 
the Emperor of Germany. While in some respects the 
people benefit, after all the people are despoiled of prop- 
erty and power. 

In New Zealand the exact reverse is true. The rail- 
roads have been taken from the hands of exploitation 
and turned over to the people. They have become a part 
of the Commonwealth. In this millennial island the 
people are friends, not enemies, without millionaires and 
without paupers. The New Zealanders have not only 
the largest private and individual wealth per capita in 
the world, $1,500 for every man, woman, and child in 
the country, but each individual is, over and above all 
this, a part owner in the splendid properties of the state, 
of which each individual is an organic and responsible 
part. There Government ownership does not militate 
against private property. But the fraternal spirit out of 
which government ownership has sprung has begun to 
solve the racking problem of older and less happy 
civilizations — the problem of distribution. 

Paternalism under the Louis who said, "I am the 
state," was essentially and fundamentally different from 
what here, under democratic institutions, many alleged 
intelligent individualists speak of with rage and fear as 
paternalism. There can be no paternalism without a. 



PATERNALISM 141 

paternal government. Government control with us is the 
political aspect of self -control. From the American 
standpoint law and constitution are not imposed upon 
us by a power extraneous to ourselves and successful 
because stronger. We are power. Law and constitu- 
tion are those forms of our own corporate reason which 
we have thrown around ourselves in the compromise of 
civilized government. And we are the government 
through our representatives. If we do not like our own 
government we can change it, for we have no irrespon- 
sible monarch proclaiming, "I am the state." 

Government control, if it be control, or national self- 
government, means the self-guarding of the rights of 
all the individuals by all the individuals, which is all 
the people of a nation. It means that if under capi- 
talistic centralization the sphere for independent action 
is being narrowed and the field of individual initiative 
is being restricted, if under untrammeled competition 
the strong and the cunning tend to occupy the entire 
field of opportunity, the nation steps in — that is, the 
people organized, and bring this instrument — national 
Government — to bear in the interests of individual 
liberty, which is the sine qua non of true democracy. 
But the interests of individual liberty can be served only 
under constitutional liberty, not monarchy, for real 
individual liberty does not mean license to capricious 
action. 

Individualism is defeating the very aim and end of 
democracy, in defeating individual liberty — not that 
liberty is the end of noble life, but a necessary means to 
that end. If we are incapable of self-government, so 



142 THE NEW POLITICS 

much the worse for us. Government control under a 
•government of, and by, and for the people might better 
be called an ethical democracy. If we are afraid of 
government control, we are afraid of law and order, 
even though that law and order are the rational and 
ethical expressions of our best selves, and not the 
irresponsible ipse dixit of a military despotism. This 
distinction has been present to most Americans, if at all, 
in their moments of absent-mindedness. But it is a 
fundamental distinction, and it is because we are a self- 
governing people that a strong government is better 
than a weak one; a large and complicated sphere of 
government better than a police force. And this will 
appear more and more true in proportion as we increase 
in population and diversity of interest. 

The growing system which is at once the bulwark and 
pride of our nation is set in the foundation of a democ- 
racy, and is a recognition on the part of the entire people 
that the entire nation has duties toward all the people 
as well as that all the people have rights. 

When Diderot, Quesnay, Condorcet, Holbach pro- 
tested against state interference with the religious be- 
liefs and the industrial pursuits of the humble citizens 
of France, there was reason in the doctrine of laissez 
faire. 

But when it is applied to the institutions of a self- 
governing free people, the conditions are reversed, and 
there is new meaning in the purposive mission of the 
state. 



CHAPTER IV 

SOCIALISM 

The most eloquent advocates of socialism the world 
has ever seen are "certain rich men" who need never 
say a word. It is not that they are rich men. Few 
rational people have any valid objection to rich men or 
to reasonable fortunes. Moreover, these men are as 
high types of rich men as ever got large fortunes to- 
gether, and the highest type who ever got so much, for 
they have a large portion of the entire national wealth. 
This is why the institution of financialism stands in advo- 
cacy of socialism instead of anarchy. If they, with their 
financial power, were like some of our financiers they 
would make anarchists. The scientifically inclined are 
drawing curves to see how long it will take for them or 
others to own it all. And how much will it take in hard 
assets, with the awful credit power that goes with it, 
for a few men to own the controlling interest in the 
United States. Do they do it now ? 

It was but a few months ago (as things go) that we 
were frightened at Harriman's two billions, and a year 
or two before at Rockefeller's billion. Before the Civil 
War all the wealth — the total capital of all the million- 
aires in the United States — amounted to one man's profits 
on one deal, or his income for a few months, or perhaps 
weeks. 

This is what is making socialists. If it comes to the 
point of saying whether all the people of the United 

143 



i 4 4 THE NEW POLITICS 

States shall own the controlling interest, or a few men 
shall own the controlling interest, the verdict of the 
American people will be for themselves — i. e., for 
socialism. 

It is quite amusing, though sometimes exasperating, 
to have socialists pick up here and there acts of legisla- 
tion tending toward social justice or industrial ame- 
lioration and hold them out in the palms of their hands 
and say, "Behold! so much redeemed to socialism!" 

There are great areas of life and thought common to 
the best minds and spirits of men which cannot be fenced 
off by a party or monopolized by a sect. The religion- 
ist cannot claim a reformed drunkard as a recruit to 
Methodism because he has sworn off, nor can the disciple 
of Brigham Young find an advance in Mormonism in 
every flirtation. Socialism does not mean merely asso- 
ciation. Nor does the antithesis of individualism mean 
socialism. Nor does political socialization mean that it 
is socialistic. 

Socialism is a system. It is a life philosophy and it 
hangs together. 

Individualism is a system. Christianity is a system. 
It too is a life philosophy and it too hangs together. 
There are some of the teachings of the one to be found 
in the other. But this does not mean that they are 
identical. 

There is a certain area of socialization in society, if 
I may use the expression, which cannot be called social- 
ism at all. 

We must distinguish sharply between the purposive 
mission of the state and the aims of socialism, for it is 



SOCIALISM 145 

only in the further use, I may say the historically intelli- 
gent use, of the principle of association as opposed to 
individualism, of the cohesive as opposed to the dis- 
junctive forces of the nation, that we shall find the cure 
for the tremendous socialistic tendency of the day. 

It is unfortunate that such words as "society" and 
"association" are derived from the same root as the 
word "socialism." 

The average unintelligent individualist has a certain 
pathetic and hopeless way about him of confounding 
socialism with that form of socialization which in a 
national state tends to "promote the general welfare." 
To surrender to socialism the ethical purpose and mis- 
sion of a state is sooner or later to surrender the state 
to socialism. 

The principle of government control or state inter- 
ference, as the English call it, or paternalism, as the 
unthinking call it, is not and never can be socialism. It 
is indeed difficult to define socialism. So many vague 
and Utopian dreamers have identified it with other things 
that the public is not aware that socialism, as socialism, 
as defined by European authorities and accepted by the 
great mass of those who call themselves socialists to- 
day, means revolutionary socialism. And revolutionary 
socialism means the abolition of practically all private 
property, and further, many believe in the abolition of 
the institution of the family. The most revolutionary 
exponents of this doctrine are the continental socialists, 
where radicalism as expressed in anarchy or socialism 
is reaction against tyranny. Such theories as the Chris- 
tian Socialism of Maurice and Kingsley scarcely exist 



146 THE NEW POLITICS 

to-day. Socialism is sweeping over the world like a 
flood, and Canute cannot drive it back. This is the most 
tremendous social fact in the world to be reckoned with 
by the statesman of to-day. 

Socialism is not an ethical democracy. It is not fra- 
ternal. When one speaks of fraternalism he must be 
very careful that he is speaking of something which in- 
cludes the spirit as well as the form of fraternalism. 
Just here appears the danger of reaction. Society 
achieves no gain in exchanging one tyranny for another. 
We do not move forward by breaking up one despotism 
and setting up another despotism. We do not progress 
by turning out one set of rascals and setting up another 
set of rascals. The despotism of the many is no kinder 
than that of the few. We come in the last analysis to 
two things. We cannot build up a sound nation of un- 
sound men. We cannot bind men into a rational state 
with an unethical motive. A change of method is not 
a change of motive, and a change of method is all 
socialism offers us. The present world movement of 
socialism is the reaction against the baleful developments 
of individualism, resulting through untrammeled com- 
petition in the annihilation of competition by reason of 
the fact that competition, unrestrained, has carried its 
death instruments in its own bosom. 

The strong win. The weak perish. Everywhere and 
forevermore the strong exploit and prey upon the weak 
— under monarchy in one way, under democracy in an- 
other. This results in protest — reaction. That reaction 
is socialism. Nine tenths of the socialists have been 
made by the indictments of individualism, not by the 



SOCIALISM 147 

panacea offered by socialism. What does socialism offer ? 
It is, after all, the "economic interpretation of history" 
and the promise of a shopkeepers' or proletariats' millen- 
nium. The teaching of Karl Marx is a materialism as 
unrelieved as the individualism which crushed the child- 
life of Manchester and Birmingham a hundred years 
ago. Before Marx, Saint Simon and Fourier had 
poured scorn over moralist, idealist, and philosopher. 
To them these were the word-mongers of idealism — 
dealers in some distillation or other form of that spirit- 
ualist theory which finds its best known shape in religion. 
All alike attempted to rule the world by figments. 
"Duties," says Fourier, "are only the caprices of phi- 
losophers, they are human and variable; but the passions 
are the voices of nature and God, and the end of all 
desires, the fullness of happiness, is that graduated opu- 
lence which puts one above want, and through and in it 
the satisfaction of all one's passions." 

Marx, interpreting politics, religion, and ethics as so 
many phases of economics, and economics as the science 
of the welfare of economic humanity, and as the sum, 
center, and circumference of history, postulating the 
relations and rewards of labor as the only reality in all 
history, presents us with a dialectic of materialism as naive 
and brutal as anything the human mind has ever 
wrought. What motive underlies it? Self-interest. 
What end and aim lure it? Material concerns. This is 
the philosophy of life it offers. And this will never lay 
the foundation of a great state, nor satisfy a great 
people. It is still Hedonism pure and simple — still ego- 
ism, still individualism. Individualism vs. Socialism 



i 4 8 THE NEW POLITICS 

means exactly in other words and terms : Egoism Hedon- 
ism vs. Universalistic Hedonism. 

Modem socialism is organized individualism. It is 
cooperative utilitarianism. 

It is the logical outcome of individual and competi- 
tive warfare. It is a protest against unorganized indi- 
vidualism and organized fmancialism on the same plane. 
It affords a trial of strength with the same weapons 
and in the same field. Devoid of the altruistic motive it 
is the struggle of soulless form with chaotic void. So- 
cialism is organized instinct and systematic and coordi- 
nated selfish materialism, and it fails fundamentally in 
its philosophy of life. Its motive is egoistic, not altru- 
istic. If it differs from individualism it differs only in 
method, not in motive. It has borrowed the forms of 
fraternalism with which to deceive the elect, but it has 
lost the soul because it does not believe in soul. It is 
a huge economic machine, unillumed by a ray of ethics, 
inspired by no breath of that spirit without which there 
is nothing human in man. 

What we want is a rational theory of an ethical de- 
mocracy. And this must begin in the motive of good 
will. It must work from the individual conscience, 
freed and emancipated, toward a common conscience, 
a cooperative reason. Here modern socialism falls short. 
Marx practically begins with his corporate materialism 
and works back to the individual conscience and will, to 
find them enmeshed — enslaved. Individualism and social- 
ism are both economic materialisms, and offer two as- 
pects of the bread-and-butter theory of the state. Mr. 
Leslie Stephen calmly remarks, speaking of the individ- 



SOCIALISM 149 

ualist point of view, that politics is a matter of business 
and resents the intrusion of first principles. The funda- 
mental maxim of Karl Marx is that all human institu- 
tions and beliefs are in their ultimate sources the outcome 
of economic conditions — in other words, a matter of busi- 
ness. One materialism is as brutal as the other. 

A generation since, when the philosophy of the world 
was more materialistic than it is to-day and life of the 
people was less so, Du Bois-Reymond claimed practi- 
cally that the history of man is the history of tools — that 
it is the history of the invention of those implements 
which enabled man thus far to conquer and control nature. 
Before this Marx had worked out his conception of his- 
tory. Before him still, the prophets of Manchester worked 
out their sodden gospel. The individualistic political 
economy is simply a statement of the principles of an- 
archy dipped in rosewater and applied to economics. 

It will be admitted at once that economic conditions 
have profoundly modified human history and must ever 
do so. There are elements, however, between the lines 
of economic latitude, a spiritual longitude, as it were, 
which have escaped the historic or scientific materialist. 
A man is not merely the most intelligent brute in 
creation; he is not a disembodied spirit, and it must be 
admitted that the future does not belong to the cultured 
and refined except on condition of a certain physical 
basis of blood and bone and brawn. 

The economic aspect of life offers but one set of the 
vital problems connected with human progress, and to 
other than bread-and-butter consideration we turn in our 
weariness and ask with Savage Landor, "Show me how 



ISO THE NEW POLITICS 

great projects were executed, great advantages gained, 
and great calamities averted. Show me the generals 
and statesmen who stood foremost, that I may bend to 
them in reverence. Let the books of the Treasury lie 
closed as religiously as the Sibyl's. Leave weights and 
measures in the market place, commerce in the harbor, 
the Arts in the light they love, philosophy in the shade. 
Place History on her rightful throne, and at the side of 
her Eloquence and War." 

The reconciliation of the individual and the state 
rests in good will and moral purpose. There social 
and individual rights meet and lose their antagonisms 
in this larger freedom of the good will. 

The departure from individualism, organized or ram- 
pant, begins in the dawn of the motive of good will. I 
mean that kindly and sweet-tempered spirit which has 
ceased to raise an ethical standard on the point of view 
of the individual selfishness and starts out on the long 
upward process of evolution toward human sympathy 
and helpfulness. I mean that good will which is opposed 
to the principle of war as the ruling instinct of humanity, 
and conceives the better part in working together for 
the same thing instead of against each other for the 
same thing — that good will which Kant called "the only 
unconditioned good in the universe. ,, 

The departure from the individualistic point of view 
is where the individual ceases to be the final court of 
appeal, when the individual begins to consider itself 
from the standpoint of the universe and not the universe 
from the standpoint of the individual. 

In politics and economics the problem becomes one as 



SOCIALISM 151 

to whether the element of good will shall find less or 
more scope ; whether the area of the common good shall 
be enlarged and restricted — whether, in fact, the "harmo- 
nious development of the human race" lies toward the 
motive of good will and the ideal of a united and 
friendly humanity, or in the motive of the selfish instinct 
and the ideal of atoms at war. Here lies the problem of 
politics and the fate of democracy, in which, L e., in 
the true democracy, not the false, is involved the future 
of human freedom. Will the "harmonious development 
of the human race" and human liberty, in so far as it 
contributes to that kind of development, result from a 
government more rational and more ethical — which is to 
say of more solidarity — or from one whence the cohesive 
power and aim of reason have been taken away — and 
which in losing the boundaries of rational form and the 
binding power of good will has lost both body and soul ? 
If we agree that the state, like the Sabbath, was made 
for man and not man for the state ; if we agree that the 
individual is the end of civilization and of nature, then 
let us ask a further question. Is this end so much to 
be desired attainable by each individual seeking his own 
expansion and perfection independently, through the 
motive of selfish instinct, each without reference to the 
interests of the rest, according to the platitudinous dic- 
tums of laissez faire-ism in general, that the good is the 
resultant of innumerable conflicting self-interests ; or does 
the perfection of human character, or individuality, lie 
in discipline, in self-identification with the universal 
good, and does that perfection lie, so far as politics 
modifies it, toward anarchy or toward an ethical and 



152 THE NEW POLITICS 

rational state? "Morality is the substance of the state, 
or, in other words, the state is the development and af- 
firmation of the people's united moral will; but religion 
is the substance of both moral and political life. The 
state is founded on the moral character of the people and 
their morality is founded on their religion. . . . The 
basis of the laws to which men must submit must exist 
prior to all the laws that are founded upon it. It is the root 
from which they spring or the developing substance of 
their existence. Apart from all metaphysical discussion 
on morality and religion, the truth remains, that they 
must ever be viewed as inseparable. There cannot be two 
consciences in man, one for practical and another for 
religious interests. Accordingly, as he deeply and sin- 
cerely believes, so he will act. Religion must be the basis 
of morals, and morality must be the foundation of a 
state. ... It is the monstrous error of our times to 
wish to regard these inseparable (politics, morals, and 
religion) as if they have been separable one from the 
other: yea, as if they were indifferent to one another 
. . . as if the state's whole moral system, including its 
constitution and its laws as founded on reason, could 
stand of itself and on its own ground" (Hegel). 

The religion of a people, like the ethics of a people, 
must be immanent in their political and social institu- 
tions. If this is not possible in a democracy, then 
democracy must go and the people with it. But this is 
not possible under individualism, for political ethics and 
ethical politics are not possible under individualism. 

Hegel contends that the Ultramontane theory of re- 
ligious authority can never be made to accord with any 



SOCIALISM 153 

political institutions that are not despotic. No govern- 
ment can be safe while the people regard it as existing 
outside the sanctions of a religion found outside the 
state. Not a state, I take it, does he mean, over which 
religious authority is exercised, but through which the 
authority of the spiritual reason is supreme. 

A rational analysis of the idea of the state will show 
not only that we owe duties to the state if we claim 
rights, but that the state itself has duties, if we allow that 
it has rights, and if it expects from us the discharge of 
our obligations. In the development of this idea of reci- 
procity lies a completer idea of a state; and in this lies 
a more congenial environment for happiness and virtue. 
For it is just at the point at which we depart from the 
reacting democracy of the revolutions of the eighteenth 
century — i. e., from the pigeon-breasted catch phrases of 
all right and no duties — it is just where we admit the 
principle of mutual obligation that we lay the psycho- 
logical foundations of law and order and of the rational 
state. For the state is built in the idea of a common life. 
What is the substance of the word justice but the public 
good, the common weal? 

It is here — in the element of reciprocity — that we find 
the justification of the idea that the state itself has duties 
as well as rights, and it is through the function of the 
duties of a state that it proceeds on sound and legitimate 
lines to "promote the general welfare." 



CHAPTER V 

THE INDIVIDUAL AND POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 

The question must arise somewhere about here as to 
whether a system of anarchy or of law and order offers 
the better environment for the development of sound 
individuality, which (it must be admitted) is the only 
basis of sound nationality. This brings up the point 
that we must distinguish sharply between the claims 
of individuality and those of individualism. In other 
words, is it under individualism or socialism, or that 
nameless middle ground which for want of a better name 
we have called nationalism, that the best type of indi- 
viduality may develop ? Let it be said at once that those 
who fear socialism as much as they do individualism, 
and who fear both only less than they do Mephistopheles 
himself, are among the most strenuous advocates for the 
liberties and dignities of the individual. Where we 
differ from the socialist is in that we believe in keeping 
a large area out of the deadening influences of a bureau- 
cracy for private volition and initiative; and where we 
differ from the individualist is that we believe that 
"character building," which is unrecognized by modern 
legislators, as Herbert Spencer, the philosophical anarch- 
ist, laments, may be better pursued through rational 
forms of law and order in a highly organized state than 
in the quasi-anarchy which must exist under Herbert 
Spencer's watch-dog theory of the state. 

I will admit, for a moment, with a prominent individ- 

154 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 155 

ualist (Crozier), that "the elevation and expansion of 
the individual is the goal of civilization, the true end of 
government [the italics are mine] and the end to which 
nature works." 

If I go further than Crozier and say that there is 
no politics possible which is not based on a philosophy 
of life which, after all its labyrinthine wanderings, comes 
back as it were at last to Abraham's bosom and rests in 
the individual soul, I hope it will not be inferred that 
the individual referred to is the detached and solitary 
human monad hermetically sealed in 200 pounds of 
acquisitive avoirdupois. I am speaking of an individu- 
ality which cannot be conceived apart from spirituality, 
"of the elevation and extension of the individual" which 
is "the goal of civilization, the true end of government/' 
for I will not allow an avowed individualist to outdo me, 
whether it be Crozier or Herbert Spencer, in enlarging, 
dignifying, and moralizing state action, making "the ele- 
vation and expansion of the individual" the true end of 
government, or "character making" the most important 
end of the legislator. 

I am speaking of the individuality of the individual 
character, which is inseparable from, and which is the 
offspring of, sociality; an individuality which is impos- 
sible in solitude or savagery — whose secret has not been 
found by the wild man of Borneo. The simple propo- 
sition is that the most perfect character is not developed 
by shutting itself up, but by opening itself up. 

I am ready to repeat my contention that a rational 
theory of life, without which there is no rational poli- 
tics, must bring us to the bedrock of a sane theory of 



156 THE NEW POLITICS 

personal character. Hence the distinction that a study 
in individuality is far from a study in individualism. 
The latter is a theory of life. It is preeminently the 
self-centered theory. Its politics and ethics, if indeed 
politics and ethics are possible under individualism, are 
those of philosophic nihilism, for this is equivalent to 
philosophical individualism. 

The British Constitutional Association (Introduc- 
tion to Doctor Saleeby's recent Lectures in Edinburgh 
on Individualism and Collectivism) states that "The 
Association contends that the following quotation from 
Herbert Spencer's First Principles proves clearly that 
the path of progress is from freedom to greater freedom, 
and that collectivist measures for curbing the individual 
in the supposed interests of the many are as retrogressive 
as they are unscientific and non-political: 

Our political practice and our political theory alike utterly re- 
ject those regal prerogatives which once passed unquestioned. 
. . . Thought, our forms of speech, and our state documents 
still assert the subjection of the citizens to the ruler, our actual r 
beliefs and our daily proceedings, implicitly assert the contrary. 
. . . Nor has the rejection of primitive political beliefs resulted 
only in transferring the authority of an autocrat to a representative 
body. . . . 

How entirely we have established the personal liberties of the 
subject against the invasions of state-power would be quickly 
demonstrated, were it proposed by Act of Parliament forcibly to 
take possession of the nation, or of any class, and turn its services 
to public ends; as the services of the people were turned by 
primitive rulers. And should any statesman suggest a redistribu- 
tion of property, such as was sometimes made in ancient democratic 
communities, he would be met by a thousand-tongued denial 
of imperial power over individual possessions. Not only in our 
day have these fundamental claims of the citizen been thus made 
good against the state, but sundry minor claims likewise. 

Ages ago, laws regulating dress and mode of living fell into 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 157 

disuse; and any attempt to revive them would prove the current 
opinion to be, that such matters lie beyond the sphere of legal 
control. For some centuries we have been asserting in practice, 
and have now established in theory, the right of every man to 
choose his own religious beliefs, instead of receiving such beliefs 
on state-authority. Within the last few generations we have in- 
augurated complete liberty of speech, in spite of all legislative 
attempts to suppress or limit it. And still more recently we have 
claimed and finally obtained, under a few exceptional restrictions, 
freedom to trade with whomsoever we please. Thus our political 
beliefs are widely different from ancient ones, not only as to the 
proper depository power to be exercised over a nation, but also 
as to the extent of that power. 

Not even here has the change ended. Besides the average 
opinions which we have just described as current among ourselves, 
there exists a less widely diffused opinion going still further in the 
same direction. There are to be found men who contend that 
the sphere of government should be narrowed even more than 
it is in England. They hold that the freedom of the individual, 
limited only by like freedom of other individuals, is sacred; and 
that the legislature cannot equitably put further restrictions upon 
it, either by forbidding any actions which the law of equal freedom 
permits, or taking away any property save that required to pay 
the cost of enforcing this law itself. 

Sir Arthur Clay, Bart., says of Doctor Saleeby's lec- 
tures, "We must all feel grateful to our lecturer for his 
vigorous reassertions of the value and truth of Herbert 
Spencer's teaching, and we must all feel that we have ar- 
rived at a point in social questions at which the road 
divides and that one of its branches is the 'pathway to 
the stars,' while the other leads us, we believe, to social 
disintegration and a slow but sure reversion to lower 
stages of human condition than that to which we have 
attained with so much effort and through such bitter 
experience. The British Constitutional Association 
stands at the parting of the ways and urges our citizens 
to choose the nobler path." 



158 THE NEW POLITICS 

Let us lose no time in congratulating the British Con- 
stitutional Association upon this clean cut distinction 
and this noble advice. Let us hasten to say that while 
we might make some restrictions as regards the bearing 
of Herbert Spencer's teachings upon this subject, we 
agree wholly that we are at the fork in the road and 
that as between the two paths ahead we unhesitatingly 
warn the weary pilgrim to avoid that which leads to 
"social disintegration" and those "lower stages of human 
condition" which lie in the chaos of individualism in 
that remote past, where everywhere the egoistic instinct 
prevailed and out of which civilization, which is nothing 
more nor less than socialization, has been calling law 
and order in its slow but steady progress in its "pathway 
to the stars." 

"Says Herbert Spencer," says Doctor Saleeby, "in 
"words which I make no apology for quoting at 
length : 

" 'Let it be seen that the future of a nation depends 
on the nature of its units; that their natures are inevi- 
tably modified in adaptation to the conditions in which 
they are placed ; that the feelings called into play by these 
conditions will strengthen, while those which have 
diminished demands on them will dwindle. . . . 

" 'Of the ends to be kept in view by the Legislator all 
are unimportant compared with the end of character 
making; and yet character making is an end wholly un- 
recognized.' " 

Doctor Saleeby closes his lecture with this significant 
remark, "Either the state is very far wrong or the great 
individualist. I leave you to choose between them." 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 159 

Let us admit, confidentially, that it is the state this 
time. It is rare, and indeed one of the most unusual 
of pleasures, to be able to agree with Herbert Spencer. 
So much of Herbert Spencer's work has been devoted to 
the philosophy of individualism that it is rather startling 
to find Saul among the prophets. "Of the ends to be 
kept in view by the legislator," says Mr. Spencer — but 
then there are only two or three ends to be kept in view 
by the legislator, according to Herbert Spencer, and 
what these are we might ask before going further. 
There are plenty of passages which outline the intensity 
of his individualism and his hatred of state action, but 
none which outline a better idea of his views than that 
which the British Constitutional Association presents as 
proving "clearly that the path of progress is from free- 
dom to greater freedom and that collectivist measures for 
curbing the individual in the supposed interest of the 
many are as retrogressive as they are unscientific and 
non-political." Here he contends "that the sphere of 
government should be narrowed even more than it is 
in England . . . that the legislature cannot equitably put 
further restrictions upon it either by forbidding any 
actions which the law of equal freedom permits, or tak- 
ing away any property save that required to pay the 
cost of enforcing this law itself." 

Just where the capital is coming from to set up the 
legislator in the business of "character making" under 
these restrictions is a question that, Herbert Spencer being 
dead, is left for Doctor Saleeby, or Sir Arthur Clay, to 
explain, and just where the principle of collectivism can 
be made to appear in a state so highly organized as to 



160 THE NEW POLITICS 

assume the ethical and social function of "character 
making" (and it is agreed that this is "an end wholly 
unrecognized") will hardly be found in "Social Statics," 
"First Principles," or "Man versus the State." (By the 
way, why Man versus the State ? Have we not Herbert 
Spencer's whole philosophy in this title expressing an- 
tagonism between corporate and individual man?) 

I repeat that it is a rare pleasure to find the doctrine 
stated in no uncertain terms that we need more state 
interference rather than less; that the modern legislator 
is remiss in his duty ; that he is shirking his responsi- 
bilities ; and that he is to compete with parson and peda- 
gogue in legislating for a state which after all then, 
Gott sei dank, has a rational, constructive, ethical, 
spiritual, and purposive mission. 

While we are agreeing with Herbert Spencer let us 
express our further pleasure in his doctrine that "the 
future of a nation depends upon the nature of its units; 
that their natures are inevitably modified in adaptation 
to the conditions in which they are placed ; that the feel- 
ings called into play by these conditions will strengthen, 
while those which have diminished demands on them 
will dwindle." 

There are two important considerations suggested 
here. The first is as to whether a state of anarchy or a 
state of law and order is the better environment for these 
human units or offers the better opportunities for "char- 
acter making." The second is, to paraphrase Herbert 
Spencer's statement, "let it be seen that the future of 
a house depends upon the nature of the brickbats." 
The question which Herbert Spencer does not raise is 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 161 

the one of architecture. It is apparent that if the 
materials are good the house will be both a beautiful 
and comfortable home. The bricks, planks, and plaster 
(which must all be of perfect materials in perfect units 
of their kind) will by some good laissez faire chance or 
other fall together without architectural forethought into 
a whimsical form and — well — behold! The Temple of 
Individualism ! 

To return to Spencer: "The feelings called into play 
by these conditions will strengthen, while those which 
have diminished demands on them will dwindle." 

We are told by the unctuous prophets of laissez faire 
that competition is the law of life and that we develop 
strength in competition. This is quite true. "The 
feelings called into play by these conditions will 
strengthen." What are these conditions of modern com- 
petition? What kind of strength are we developing? 
And what kind of weakness are we eliminating from 
our twentieth century civilization? We are developing 
the kind of strength which prevails in our political and 
economic environment. That environment is one in 
which the strong survive and the weak are eliminated. 
And we are developing the kind of strength which is 
exercised in the struggle forced by an environment in 
which we have been unfortunate enough to have been 
born if we are unfmancial men. The strength this age 
of free competition is developing is that of hnancialism 
and almost nothing else. The financiers are masters of 
the world — the rest of us are mostly hired men. Finan- 
cialism is not only eliminating the weak, that is, the un- 
fmancial, but it is also framing and strengthening the 



162 THE NEW POLITICS 

social structure so that it reacts for the benefit and for 
the perpetuation of the strong ; that is, when you sum it 
all up, the financial instinct. 

If there is any truth in the contention that competition 
develops strength, the kind of strength developed is that 
which competes and that on the plane of competition. 
Does the theory of individualism, which is that self- 
interest is the motive and self-aggrandizement the aim, 
and a free-for-all field for wolf and lamb alike, without 
recognition of the principle of handicap, offer a fair and 
even chance for making those perfect units which are 
necessary to a perfect state? Does this environment 
offer the legislator his best field for "character making" ? 
Is not self-aggrandizement the overpowering aim of 
civilization? Is not this what most of the world is work- 
ing for, competing for? Does this process exercise the 
altruistic muscles and is it likely that great souls will 
be the fruit of a laissez faire competition of innumerable 
acquisitive instincts? Is it not likely, rather, that it will 
result in a few more acquisitive monsters and the apothe- 
osis of the multibillionaire? 

We are told that the race improves, but we are not 
informed what type of weakness is to be eliminated. 

Professor Henry Jones, of Glasgow, in a recent work 
(The Working Faith of the Social Reformer), makes a 
very important distinction. He says that both social- 
ists and individualists seem to take it for granted that 
the larger area of state control or public ownership 
restricts the field of individual initiative. 

"It will be well to ask the question," he says, "which 
both have practically overlooked. There is no doubt 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 163 

that state and civic enterprise have increased, but has 
private enterprise contracted? Can the former increase 
only at the expense of the latter? Are the two spheres 
mutually exclusive, or is it possible that the general law 
of the growth of spiritual subjects, whether individual 
or social, holds here too, and that each in developing 
may strengthen its opposite?'' 

He asks further, whether with the modern increase of 
state action private greed is disappearing under the new 
regime. He then asks a most pertinent, indeed vital, 
question, "What does the moralist fear more, or with 
better reasons, to-day than that the new industrial con- 
ditions will absorb the mind of the nation to a degree 
that imperils the deeper foundations of its welfare?" 

Again, "The contention that 'socialism is already upon 
us' is true if by that is meant that the method of organ- 
ized communal enterprise is more in use; but it is not 
true if it means that the individual's sphere of action, or 
his power to extract utilities, that is, wealth, out of his 
material environment, has been limited. It is being over- 
looked that the displacement of the individual is but the 
first step in his reinstatement; and that what is repre- 
sented as the 'Coming of Socialism' may, with equal truth, 
be called the 'Coming of Individualism.' The functions 
of the state and city on the one side and those of the 
individual on the other have grown together" 

I need offer no apology to the reader in quoting fur- 
ther at some length and in filling, perhaps, another page 
with the vital and profound words of Professor Jones 
when that page would otherwise be filled with words of 
my own. 



164 . THE NEW POLITICS 

"It is quite true," he continues, "that common owner- 
ship and common enterprises turn us into limited pro- 
prietors ; but they make us limited proprietors of indefi- 
nitely large utilities." 

Just here I could have wished to see Professor Jones 
enlarge upon the point that there is almost an infinite 
number of the "indefinitely large utilities" which we can 
enjoy as much of under limited proprietorship as under 
exclusive ownership. Why shut the world out when our 
cup is already full? 

"Through the common use of public means to meet 
individual wants the real possessions and power of every 
one are enlarged. Break up the common use and the use 
for each by himself will be less. Take the individual out 
of the organized state, disentangle his life from that of 
his neighbor's, give him 'the freedom of the wild ass/ 
make him king of an empire of savages, and he will 
be as naked and poor and powerless as the lowest of his 
subjects, except, perhaps, for some extra plumes and 
shells. 

"State and citizen live and develop only in and through 
each other. It is the unmoralized community and the unso- 
cialized individual which follows methods of resistance 
and mutual exclusion. As they grow in strength — that 
is, in the power to conceive wider ends and to carry them 
out — state and citizen enter more deeply the one into the 
other. If the state owns the citizen, the citizen also owns 
the state. ... So that the individualist might well 
desire more 'state interference' and the socialist more 
'private rights' for the best means of producing strong 
men is a highly organized state, and the only way of 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 165 

producing a strong state is to make the citizens own so 
much, care for so much, be responsible for so much, 
that each can say without injury to his neighbor, 'The 
state is mine/ " 

Notwithstanding the fact that Herbert Spencer stands 
with the nationalists in his assertion that there is no more 
important duty of the legislator than that of "character 
making" (and I confess that I agree with him wholly, 
and that the proposition is fundamental under whatever 
"ism" it may be classified), politics may be considered as 
a question of environment. 

It is not claimed by the New Politics that legislation 
will recreate human character or reform the world, or 
that the state, centralized or decentralized, can ever be- 
come what Bentham characterized as a "mill to grind 
rogues honest" (Theodore Roosevelt, Dynamic Geog- 
rapher, Henry Frowde, by the present writer). The vain 
regret is as old as the memory of Antisthenes, who im- 
plored the Senate of his time to make horses of asses 
by official vote. The new democracy of nationalism claims 
for itself that it offers the forms of a rational association 
in a sphere of the state, enlarged and moralized, which 
will constitute a political environment where everything 
in the individual that is best and worth preserving will 
be encouraged instead of thwarted, and where the kind- 
lier impulses of the human heart, the most of which are 
being choked in the maelstrom of individualism, shall have 
at least even chances for existence. If the state will 
offer a political environment which will make the public 
well-being possible, the public will look out for itself. 
The pathetic message of history is that the people have 



1 66 THE NEW POLITICS 

never had a chance. What they want is a chance. An 
ethical democracy would offer them a chance. 

Plato has said somewhere that you will never have 
a perfect race of men until you have a perfect environ- 
ment, and what Spencer says is equally true, that you 
cannot have a perfect state without perfect units. 

The contribution of the Science of Biology to the study 
of environment will throw a white light on the subject if 
followed out, but I cannot do that here. For it is certain, 
and, I may say, it has passed into the common and estab- 
lished knowledge of the world, that a given organism 
will thrive better in one environment, and the fact of the 
better or the worse type will be determined by the better 
or the worse environment. 

The modern city, for example, which kills its entire 
population in every four generations, is constantly being 
recuperated from the country. However, it is producing 
several new types of human being, new to the world 
without doing credit to it. The institution of financial- 
ism is producing its types, and developing them on logi- 
cal lines, straight toward their prototypes, the dog, the 
cat, and jackal families, with the element of intellect 
added to the primordial instincts of their possible far- 
away ancestors. 

Now and then a dusty wayside throws out a flower, 
escaped from the trampling of many hoofs or feet, but 
ordinarily "flowers grow in the gardens of those who 
love them," and who understand them, and who under- 
stand the environment in which a flower thrives. 

Once for all let it be admitted that no sane theory will 
allow the world to lose the freedom of the individual, 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 167 

provided by freedom we do not mean lawlessness. The 
chief argument against all socialism, from the social- 
isms of the muck-rake to the socialisms of dreamland, is 
that they indeed point to a "coming slavery" — slavery 
to the mob. The health of nations lies in a sound and 
free individuality. 

We are coming to question the place hitherto given 
to liberty as life's chief good in and of itself, and to 
suspect that liberty instead of being an end is a means 
to an end. But more than this, whether it is an end or 
means to the end, it is to be found by indirection. It is 
to be found by seeking something else. Individual liberty 
does not lie toward individualism. The growing recog- 
nition of the principle of the enlargement of liberty 
through the principle of association may be used to bring 
up again, even though but for a glance before we pass 
on, the question of this matter of liberty — I mean politi- 
cal liberty. 

By far the ablest presentation of the opposite view 
of this subject is that of Mill on "Liberty/* published in 
the middle of the nineteenth century, basing his argu- 
ment not on abstract "natural right," but on expediency. 
But John Stuart Mill, before he died, recognized very 
clearly that even the appeal to utility required con- 
clusions which swept the support from individualism, 
and one of the most charming chapters in the history 
of human thought is that of this "Saint of Rational- 
ism," as Gladstone called him, at last admitting the 
futility of individualism as a philosophy of life. 

Had not Bentham, his master, built his system on the 
Epicurean doctrine that "pleasure is the chief good," and 



1 68 THE NEW POLITICS 

had not Bentham expressly said, "Epicurus was the only 
one among the ancients who had the merit of having 
known the true source of morality" ? 

In his charming autobiography Mill describes a crisis 
in his life. He had been reading of a heroic action in 
Marmontel's "Memoires." "They led me to adopt a 
new theory of life," he says. "Those only are happy 
(I thought) who have their minds fixed on some other 
object than their own happiness; on the happiness of 
others, or the improvement of mankind, even on some 
art or pursuit followed not as a means but itself an ideal 
end. Aiming thus at something else they find happiness 
by the way. The only chance is to treat not happiness 
but some end external to it as the purpose of life. . . . 
This theory now became the basis of my philosophy of 
life." 

It is easy to see where this entire abandonment of 
individualism must necessarily lead him. He states that 
his first idea of the solidarity of the race and the unity 
of history was given him by reading the political writ- 
ings of the St. Simonian School of France. "I was 
greatly struck with the connected view which they for the 
first time presented to me of the natural order of human 
progress." Speaking of the "third period" of his life, 
he writes of his wife and himself together, and of his 
opinions having "gained in breadth." 

"While we repudiated with the greatest energy that 
tyranny of society over the individual which most social- 
ist systems are supposed to involve, we yet looked for- 
ward to a time when society will no longer be divided 
into the idle and industrious; when the rule that they 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 169 

who do not work shall not eat will be applied not to 
paupers only, but impartially to all ; when the provision 
of the produce of labor, instead of depending in so 
great a degree as it now does on the accident of birth, 
will be made by concert on an acknowledged principle of 
justice; and when it will no longer either be, or be 
thought to be, impossible for human beings to exert them- 
selves strenuously in procuring benefits which are not 
to be exclusively their own but to be shared with the 
society they belong to. The social problem of the future, 
we considered to be how to unite the greatest individual 
liberty of action with a common ownership in the raw 
material of the globe and an equal participation of all in 
the combined benefits of labor." "We were now much less 
democrats than I had been ... an ideal of ultimate 
improvement went far beyond Democracy, and would 
class us decidedly under the general designation of 
Socialists." 

What happened in the life of John Stuart Mill is too 
slowly happening to this age. We began where he began, 
and we are experiencing a development similar to his. 
We are learning that liberty is something other than 
license, and that it is to be gained by a utilization of the 
principle of association and not of the principle of strife. 
We are beginning to question the dogmas of an earlier 
age, that pleasure is the chief end of man and that un- 
restricted liberty is the chief means of its attainment. 
We are, however, more than ever convinced that the 
principle of liberty is something to be held at all hazards, 
and that in all our theoretical wanderings we must never 
lose sight of individual liberty as the beginning of prog- 



170 THE NEW POLITICS 

ress ; but that individual liberty is the product of law and 
order. "To obey God is freedom" (Seneca). 

It is profoundly true that there is no freedom possible 
to the man who has not become master of himself, his 
whims and instincts — and there is but one road to 
this — through discipline. There is a discipline of free- 
dom and there is a discipline of law. "None can love 
freedom heartily," says Milton, "but good men : the rest 
love not freedom but license, which never hath more 
scope or more indulgence than under tyrants." 

"Moral liberation and political freedom must advance 
together," says Hegel, "the process must demand some 
vast space of time for its full realization; but it is the 
law of the world's progress and the Teutonic nations are 
destined to carry it into effect. The Reformation was 
an indispensable preparation for this great work. . . . 
The failure of the French Revolution to realize liberty 
was because it aimed at external liberation without the 
indispensable condition of moral freedom. . . . The 
progress of freedom can never be aided by a revolution 
that has not been preceded by a religious reformation." 

"Liberalism as an abstraction, emanating from France, 
traversed the Roman world; but religious slavery held 
that world in the fetters of political servitude. For it 
is a false principle that the fetter which binds Right and 
Freedom can be broken without the emancipation of 
conscience — that there can be a Revolution without a 
Reformation. . . . Material superiority in power can 
achieve no enduring results; Napoleon could not coerce 
Spain into freedom any more than Philip II could force 
Holland into slavery." 



POLITICAL ENVIRONMENT 171 

Wordsworth wrote on the margin of an article which 
denounced him as a democrat : "I am a lover of liberty, 
but am aware that liberty cannot exist apart from order." 

Even the late Lord Acton, profoundly individualistic 
as he was, said once in spite of his polemic against 
nationality, that neither liberty nor authority is con- 
ceivable except in a well ordered society and is remote 
from either anarchy or tyranny. "Constitutional 
Government/' says a biographer, "was for him the sole 
eternal truth in politics, the rare but the only genuine 
guardian of freedom." 

"Everything in nature," says Kant, "acts according 
to laws : the distinction of a rational being is the faculty 
of acting according to the consciousness of laws." 

The free man, therefore, is the man who does not what 
instinct demands but what reason requires, since reason 
is as much or more of the real nature of man than 
instinct. 

Wherever human liberty has appeared in this world 
it has quickly disappeared again unless it has been guar- 
anteed by law and order. Human rights are ordained 
by civilized society and human beings have never any- 
where enjoyed those rights except through law and order 
as constituted by civilized society. Emerson speaks of 
what he calls "this law of laws," by which "the universe 
is made safe and habitable." 

My contention is that human liberty (and human wel- 
fare as well) is promoted and safeguarded by neither 
anarchy nor socialism, but in a rational social order 
swung in a proper equilibrium between local self-govern- 
ment and national self-government. 



i 7 2 THE NEW POLITICS 

Law and order are not the destruction but the safe- 
guard of individual liberty, and a rational state is the 
only environment in which the flower may grow. But 
the state is founded in the idea of reciprocity. So is 
the golden rule. Social ethics and individual ethics 
have the same foundation ; therefore there is no diversity 
of real interest and no real dividing line between the 
individual and the social self. Liberty is not the fruit 
of the solitary life. For he who isolates his mind and 
heart as nature has isolated his body, is a freak or a 
criminal, for, as Aristotle said long ago, "he must be a 
beast or a god who would live alone." 



CHAPTER VI 

FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 

The clue to the making of nineteenth century 
thought has been clearly given by the late Professor 
Edward Caird: "The idea of organic unity, and, as 
implied in that, the idea of development! 3 "Goethe and 
Hegel in Germany : Comte in France, Darwin and Spen- 
cer in England . . . and a multitude of others in every 
department of study, have been inspired by the ideas 
of organism and development. . . . These ideas have 
been the marked ideas of the century, the conscious or 
unconscious stimulus of its best thought" ; and they are 
working "in the direction of a deeper and more compre- 
hensive irenicon . . . than has been attained in any 
previous stage of the history of philosophy." 

"The peculiar nineteenth century movement begins 
with a reassertion of the universal as against the indi- 
vidual." "Philosophy was no longer content to regard 
the whole as the sum of the parts, but could look upon 
the distinction of the parts only as a differentiation of 
the whole" (Progress of the Century, Harper, 1901). 
Professor Caird further develops the thesis that the best 
and latest thing in philosophic evolution is the spirit 
which does not oppose the universal to the individual, but 
synthesizes both. It is so with us. We want all the 
truth there is in individualism. We want all the truth 
there is in socialism. It must be a synthesis, which is 
neither individualism nor socialism. Politically what 

173 



174 THE NEW POLITICS 

shall we call it ? Nationalism ? It matters less what we 
call it than what we make it. 

Caird undertook a criticism of Comte's Social Phi- 
losophy (which might be said to be in a sense based on 
the proposition that there is no philosophy of the indi- 
vidual apart from a philosophy of humanity) from the 
point of view of the proposition that "there can be no 
religion of humanity which is not also a religion of 
God." "And this means," continues Caird, "that it is 
logically impossible to go beyond the merely individual- 
istic point of view with which Comte started, except on 
the assumption that the intelligence of man is, or involves, 
a universal principle of knowledge/' 

Until our appeal to reason goes back of the individual 
opinion and finds reality in the corporate intelligence of 
man — an intelligence which "is, or involves, a universal 
principle of knowledge" — we are lost in the confusions of 
illimitable and irredeemable wastes. There is no possi- 
bility of a conception of an ethical state, on the basis of 
atomism, for the democracy of individualism is destitute 
of an architectonic idea, as well as of that cohesive prin- 
ciple which alone makes a state possible; viz., the nexus 
of good will in a framework of the common good. 
There is no common good possible where the nexus is 
enmity and not good will. An aggregation of scram- 
bling, grasping selfishnesses does not make a rational 
state. We have seen it illustrated only too well if we 
have given heed to the testimony of history. 

"If history can tell us little of the past and nothing 
of the future," says Froude, "why waste our time over 
so barren a study? History is a voice forever sounding 



FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 175 

across the centuries the laws of right and wrong, Right, 
the sacrifice of self to good; Wrong, the sacrifice of 
good to self. . . . Justice and truth alone endure and 
live. Injustice and falsehood may be long lived, but 
Doomsday comes at last to them in French Revolutions 
and other terrible ways." 

If we study carefully those movements of thought 
underneath the growth of nationalism in the United 
States we shall find, although it has been for the most 
part unrecognized, that it has been fostered by a sense 
of the inadequacy of anarchy as a theory of government, 
and by the conviction that the centripetal force of society, 
that which holds it together, that which gives it unity, 
is good will, not hatred. Good will must be the basis 
of true democracy. The basis of the democracy of indi- 
vidualism is the principle of strife. If this then be 
democracy; if democracy is essentially strife, and if its 
direction is toward and not away from individualism, by 
all means let us have something other than democracy, 
for there is no ethical meaning in any theory of inor- 
ganic juxtaposition of unrelated competing political 
units. If there is to be a realignment of parties on a 
philosophical, which is to say a rational, basis, it will be 
somewhere along this line. To the democracy of indi- 
vidualism which is the party of the past will gravitate 
every vested privilege, every sacred graft, every holy 
vehicle of plunder, every sainted boss— the entire system 
revolving around the central sphere of selfish clamoring 
for liberty and rights ; i. e., immunity. To the party of 
the future to which our young men are already coming, 
those also will come who believe in the state as some- 



176 THE NEW POLITICS 

thing better than an instrument to serve the stronger in- 
dividualistic interest; who conceive of the nation as an 
entity toward which we must discharge our duties if 
we claim our rights ; who will try to substitute for that 
ugly, greedy cash gourmandism which forms the nexus of 
our present predatory society, the kindlier, saner element 
of good will. We have progressed far enough in this di- 
rection, so that few of us, like the Shah of Persia at the 
Prince of Wales's dinner, would be so enamored of 
cucumbers that we would empty the whole dish in our 
shirt bosom, and yet we will do it with dollars in the 
office and on the street. The principle has been estab- 
lished in polite society that we need neither hurry nor 
gorge at the table of a friend, for the pantry is 
full — but — "business is business," though it be neither 
moral, nor honorable, nor decent, nor civilized. 

Since Epicurus the ethical system of individualism has 
been pretty clearly stated by philosophers and pretty 
clearly worked out in modern history ; and the ethics of 
individualism offers an inadequate foundation for a 
rational and social state. By this time we know both its 
motive and its program. We know its results. 

Stated with brevity and completeness, its motive is 
self-interest. 

Its program is self-aggrandizement. 

Its result is anarchy. 

If certain of those who have called themselves indi- 
vidualists have labored for the welfare of mankind (and 
there have been large numbers), it has been only when 
they have forsaken the motives of their creed and 
have transgressed the confines of altruism; for individ- 



FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 177 

ualism is the system "which makes self -gratification or 
pleasure the sole object of choice" and defines morality 
as "the intelligent pursuit of that which instinct compels 
us to pursue." 

The universal cry of individualism is for the liberty 
of the individual "so far as it does not encroach upon the 
like liberty of his fellows." That sounds fair. But I 
for one have not the least idea of just exactly what it 
means. It is one of those dangerous phrases which have 
served long apprenticeship as onomatopceian catch- 
words. It seems to have some of the magic consolation 
of the word Mesopotamia ; but as to this concrete matter 
of actually encroaching upon a like liberty of one's fel- 
lows! Here is the crux. We are assuming (if we are 
individualists) that if we have our liberty we will not 
encroach upon the liberty of our fellows. In the 
multiplicity of human relations this opens up infinities 
in the universe innumerable. A very desirable status, 
truly, if every individualist enjoys his liberty excepting 
in so far as it may encroach on the like liberty of his 
fellows. But I am not quite sure that I have ever read 
in history any such status actualized in human society. 
A pretty millennial dream, truly! But I am not quite 
sure, as I look out upon the weltering throat-cutting race 
of men, that that millennial dawn is likely to be realized 
until after I have been an angel for a million years. Have 
we besotted ourselves in the fancy that the world is 
Christian and that the inhabitants thereof will act up 
to the golden rule and that no one will voluntarily en- 
croach upon a "like liberty" of his fellow even though 
he has the power? Even though he has the power! 



178 THE NEW POLITICS 

The more cunning have the power. Those who have 
the tools have the power. Those who have the knife 
by the handle have the power. Those who know the 
game have the power. What about the others? The 
weak, the innocent, the ignorant! What of those who 
hold the knife by the blade? Are we to assume equality? 
Then we assume a lie. It is the plainest kind of a sham 
and humbug, this pretension of equality, for there is 
no equality. Until we are all equal we cannot compete 
on equal terms. Free competition is the competition of 
equals, if it is fair competition. Therefore, there is no 
fair free competition — no fair free trade. Therefore 
we need a state. Therefore the state must draw its lines 
and say, "Thus far and no further." The state must 
interfere and it is the state which must say, "Thou shalt 
not encroach upon a like liberty of their fellows." This 
is the individualist state at its best. 

The democracy of nationalism means more. It differs 
from the democracy of individualism in that it includes 
duties as well as rights. It includes more — the power 
and dignity and ethical mission of the state as something 
more than a business proposition. The democracy of 
individualism a hundred years ago, as well as to-day, 
considered "enlightened self-interest" a sufficient pre- 
cipitant of economic order and a sufficient account of 
political good. Its point of view can be summed up in 
the words of Wordsworth, who hit it off in "Rob Roy's 
Grave" : 

The good old rule, the simple plan, 

That they should take who have the power, 
And they should keep who can. 



FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 179 

And the point of view was clearly shown in the 
astonished remark of the fourth Duke of Newcastle in 
the House of Lords, December 3, 1830, "May I not do 
what I like with my own?" 

The spirit which inspires the democracy of national- 
ism should be more like that of the gifted sage of the 
Greeks. When Socrates was implored by friends to 
escape from prison he replied, "I have no rights con- 
trary to Athens and her laws," and then he drank the 
hemlock. 

While nationality has at all times had a profound influ- 
ence upon the political affairs of men, the idea may be 
said to be in a renewed sense a re-creation of the nine- 
teenth century. The century of revolution preceded 
that of nation-making because the era of individualism 
preceded that of organization and socialization. The 
fearful lessons of revolution have taught the world that 
liberty is not freedom, that there is no freedom without 
law and order, that there is no law and order without 
sovereignty, no sovereignty without cohesiveness — or- 
ganization, socialization; no socialization without com- 
mon institutions, common interests, a common life, the 
binding idea of which is good will, not enmity, the result 
of which is harmony, not strife. In this common life 
lies nationality. 

We have too often lost sight of the real logical bear- 
ing of the two old Roman conceptions res publica and 
salus publica. The former connotes the common interest 
and the common life. The latter, which is based on the 
other, refers to the common good. The two in covering 
the common relations and conditions of the common life 



180 THE NEW POLITICS 

for the end of the common good cover pretty well the 
ground of nationality. 

Salus populi suprema lex estol A constitution is 
ordained "to promote the general welfare." 1 

Professor Guyot has offered a suggestive observation 
(Earth and Man, p. 83). He states that in every order 
of existence he finds three successive states identically 
repeated; "a chaos when all is confounded together; a 
development where all is separating; a unity where all 
is binding itself together and organizing/' 

The modern era of reformation and revolution is one 
in which a disintegrating philosophy is breaking up the 
chaos of Feudal and Catholic Europe. Already now the 
forces of organization are at work toward a new unity. 
This unity will be that of a rational and orderly system 
instead of that of a disintegrating and chaotic mass. Out 
of the old chaos the outlines of the great ideas underlying 
the unity of the future are beginning to appear. The 
better elements of human intelligence are already turn- 
ing away from the gospel of helter-skelter, and are work- 



1 Note i. — "In all nations of a manly spirit," says Bluntschli 
(Theory of State, p. 290), "there are thousands of men who, when 
the state is in danger or need, will undertake heavy burdens and 
will endanger both the peace of their families and their own lives. 
This spirit of self-sacrifice can only be explained on the supposi- 
tion that these men prefer the safety and welfare of their state 
and nation to their own. The deeds of ancient heroes would be 
the folly of idle fanaticism if the state were only a means of 
serving individual interests, if the collective life of the nation 
had not a higher value than the life of many individuals. In the 
great dangers and crises of the national life it becomes clear to 
men that the state is something better and higher than a mutual 
assurance society." 



FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 181 

ing out the idea of organization and scientific government 
toward the socialization of humanity and the betterment 
of the conditions of humanity. "As Progress," says 
Mazzini, "is the great intellectual discovery of the mod- 
ern world, so association is its new-found instrument." 

Louis Blanc says almost the same thing in another 
way in the opening of the Design and Plans of his His- 
tory of the French Revolution : "Three great principles 
divide the world and history among themselves : Author- 
ity — Individualism — Fraternity. . . . The principle of 
individualism is that which, taking man out of society, 
renders him the sole judge of that which surrounds him 
and of himself, gives him an exalted sentiment of his 
rights without pointing out to him his duties, abandons 
him to his own strength, and, for government, proclaims 
the let-alone system. The principle of fraternity is that 
which, regarding the members of the great family as 
homogeneous, tends one day to organize societies, the 
work of man, upon the model of the human body, the 
work of God. ... Of those three principles, the first 
engenders oppression by stifling personality; the second 
leads to oppression through anarchy; the third alone, 
by means of harmony, gives birth to liberty. " 

" 'Liberty !' said Luther ; 'liberty !' repeated in chorus 
the philosophers of the eighteenth century; and it is a 
word, liberty, which in our day is written on the banners 
of civilization. It has been misunderstood and falsified, 
and since Luther this misunderstanding, this falsehood 
have filled history ; it was individualism which happened, 
not liberty." 

It would seem that world politics is following the di- 



182 THE NEW POLITICS 

rection suggested by Guyot from one unity through dis- 
integration to another unity — or, perhaps, rather from 
uniformity to unity. Perhaps it could be stated more 
correctly by saying that through the disintegration 
of individualism, political society is being prepared for 
transformation from a mechanical uniformity to a 
rational and organic unity. 

The thing to be remembered is this, so far as this 
study is concerned, that the ideas of disintegration are 
not and cannot be the basis of a permanent and con- 
structive politics; that the vehicle of transition from 
one age to another and a different age cannot offer the 
permanent foundations of a rational state. 

In looking forward toward unity in society, or toward 
"that more perfect union" in our national politics, we 
must not confuse unity with uniformity nor trust too 
much in unity per se. We must beware of phrases as 
of shibboleths. For example, a recent writer (W. E. 
Smyth, Constructive Democracy) quotes, approving the 
words of Mr. B. Fay Mills: "Whatever tends toward 
unity is true; whatever tends toward diversity is false. 
Whatever tends toward harmony is right; whatever 
tends toward discord is wrong." 

These words offer an excellent example of an exqui- 
sitely misleading uncritical statement of a half truth. 
The half truth ignores the only truth the individualist 
admits. The statement ignores the existence of a unity 
which is false, a diversity which is true. It is here the 
socialist misses his trail. He does not recognize a proper 
sphere of individual liberty — initiative — effort. The in- 
dividualist, on the other hand, denies the conscious and 



FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 183 

orderly movement of the human monad from the stand- 
point of the social center — the social reason and will. 
There is truth in both. One cannot exclude or vitiate 
the other. For instance, I must recognize the validity of 
the earth's movement on its axis as well as its movement 
around the sun. 

There is a sphere in which, as it were, the individual 
must turn on his own axis. There is another in which 
he swings with reference to a universal outside scheme 
as he spins through space. Socialism would seem to hold 
for a harmony of dependence — the individualist for in- 
dependence. But there is a harmony — the true one — 
interdependence, which gives stability to the solar system 
— safety to the stars above us as well as to us midgets 
below. This is what our dual system means. 

To say that "whatever tends toward unity is true/' 
etc., is to say "I believe in peace at any price." But 
there is a harmony which is the type of death. There is 
a diversity which is the very condition of life. Some one 
once recognized the core of what I am contending for 
when he said, "I am for peace at any price — even at the 
cost of war." 

The half truth is what the individualist found in the 
eighteenth century and it made him a revolutionist. He 
forgot that war is not the normal state of mankind. 
Indeed, he declared that a state of war is the normal 
state of mankind. Free trade, laxssez faire — unrestricted 
competition — these were some of the watchwords of 
the gospel of strife. Later on, he took on a new con- 
ception with new watchwords which he called the 
"struggle for existence" and the "survival of the fittest." 



184 THE NEW POLITICS 

He might have said, "Whatever tends toward discord is 
right. Whatever tends toward harmony is wrong." 

The other half truth is what the socialist, in his reac- 
tion from the other creed, is proclaiming toward a 
human state, undiversified and harmonious, perhaps, but 
dead — as the Dead Sea. But the evolutionist will tell 
us that humanity's healthiest and best lies somewhere 
between unity and diversity — or rather — much rather — 
includes both — something neither eternal struggle nor 
eternal peace ; neither never-ending storm nor calm. The 
diurnal and annual motion of the earth are both necessary 
in the economy of the universe. 

And so the perfect state is made up of those individ- 
uals whose right is guaranteed to both individual ini- 
tiative and social well-being. The perfect state will 
provide for the more perfect development of the indi- 
viduality of man through and in harmony with the 
growth of his social self. 

There is a very fine passage in one of the most inter- 
esting books published in this generation, namely, the 
Posthumous Lectures and Essays on Natural Theology 
and Ethics by the late Professor William Wallace of 
Oxford : 

Man has become more and more convinced that the Divine must 
dwell among us, that it must be realized on earth as in Heaven, 
and realized not in the heart merely, but in tangible and visible 
forms. Or, to put it more definitely, the enthusiast whose glance 
passes through the dividing shams to the underlying unity is 
not content to build that long lost heritage of humanity in the 
spirit only; he will not tamely submit to the actual fragmentariness 
of life, content, if so be he can still enjoy the comforting sense 
of its ideal wholeness. He protests against the breaking up into 



FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 185 

fractions of casual, unsystematic, inharmonious character of the 
minor groupings, which actually prevail ; he shows how they are 
not duly dovetailed into each other, and that they do not tend to 
converge and form a collective universe of life; he condemns the 
inequalities which by slow accumulations have shut many men 
out of the common sunlight of humanity and forced them either 
to cower despairingly under falling hovels or to entrench them- 
selves defiantly in palatial prisons. He demands that the social 
basis of human life and action shall be realized, not as a mere 
general supervision and police of occasional interference, not as 
a system of laws which, when definite acts against the common 
weal have been traced to their author, shall restore the balance 
and status quo ante, but realized as a reasonable organization which 
watches so carefully, so closely, so wisely, that every part of the 
social machine shall never fail to keep in mind its social duty, 
that no part shall be other than an individualized organ or mis- 
sionary of the whole, that no stagnation, no block, no purely special 
or local movement shall arise to mar the uniformity of action. 

But to have a state like this it must be based on some- 
thing wholly dissimilar and antagonistic to individualism. 
There can be no ethical politics without a state framed 
in the interest of the public good. There can be no 
political recognition of the public good without a theory 
of life which offers also a theory of the "public" as 
something other than a mass of unrelated atoms. 

What one wants is that conservative middle ground 
which will insure the full and free development of both 
social and individual self, if there is a distinction between 
them. "Sacred to us is the individual," says Mazzini. 
"Sacred is society. We do not mean to destroy the former 
for the latter and found a collective tyranny, nor do we 
mean to admit the rights of the individual independ- 
ently of society and consign ourselves to perpetual 
anarchy. We want to balance the operations of liberty 
and association in a noble harmony." "What we want, 
what the people want, what the age is crying for, that it 



1 86 THE NEW POLITICS 

may find an issue from this slough of selfishness and 
doubt and negation, is a faith, a faith in which our souls 
may cease to err in search of individual ends, may march 
together in the knowledge of one origin, one law, one 
goal/' 

The Democracy of Nationalism involves elements un- 
recognized by the Democracy of Individualism. It in- 
volves certain fundamental relationships which are ethi- 
cal — framed in the forms of its institutions for the com- 
mon good. This constitutes Nationalism. If power and 
administration are kept close to the people they are 
democratic. Corporate self-government for the cor- 
porate good as opposed to political laissez faire is some- 
thing like the Democracy of Nationalism. This form 
of a state is something new in the world. Democracy 
has always been the political aspect of individualism. It 
has been anarchic. The spirit of it is what Diderot called 
the spirit of the eighteenth century — liberty. But then 
that was only one conception of liberty — license — and this 
was what Louis Blanc said it was : "It was individualism 
which happened, not liberty." 

But the state must not stop here. It is quite impossible 
for one to say off-hand what are the "duties" of a state, 
but that the state is founded on principles which make 
duties necessary is unquestioned, for the state has obli- 
gations as well as rights. The state is the institutional- 
ization of the common reason and life for the common 
good. 

Thus prayed Cleanthes, the Stoic: "Lead thou me, 
Zeus, and thou world's Law whithersoever I am ap- 
pointed to go; for I will follow unreluctant." 



FOUNDATIONS OF NATIONALISM 187 

This is a standpoint lofty enough for world politics 
or world religion. 

One turns to the insignificant individualist with sorrow. 

Thou art sick of self-love, Malvolio, 
And taste with a distempered appetite. 

There is a better standpoint for one who is not afraid 
to look life and destiny in the face, who wants to know 
the dignity of man, and that is the standpoint which 
Professor Caird used so often in his Oxford lectures: 
"Sub specie ceternitatis." 



BOOK III 
THE DEMOCRACY OF NATIONALISM 



189 



CHAPTER I 

THE OLD ISSUE 

For the first time since the Civil War, and for the third 
time in the history of the Republic, a fundamental idea 
has raised itself to the surface of our paltry political 
life to remind us that after all there is something besides 
individual interests in American Politics. 

It is the same principle in all three instances — involv- 
ing the same struggle — the principle of nationalism pro- 
testing against that of particularism, law and order op- 
posing the abuses of anarchy and inefficiency in our 
national affairs. Once more we are back on fundamen- 
tal ground. Once more the issue is raised between state 
and nation — whether the part is greater than the whole. 
Two recent movements, the anti-Trust and Conserva- 
tion movements, have disclosed the fact that there are 
certain large and important areas for which there is no 
law; over which there is no sovereignty. The self -con- 
stituted and self-perpetuating institution of financial 
privilege enthroned in Wall Street, with an unpardonable 
rapacity and with unprecedented insolence, has bulwarked 
its pretensions in the old claims of state sovereignty. 
The rise of interstate corporations incorporated within 
and responsible to a single state ; the impossibility of one 
state to catch, punish or control the financial law breaker 
with another state boundary so near; the absorption by 
these corporations of so vast an area of the national 
resources and the national domain, without recourse or 

191 



192 THE NEW POLITICS 

possibility of punishment, has raised a problem of im- 
mediate vital moment to the American people. 

To use a legal paradox, we have discovered a vast 
area of crime over which there is no law — the interstices, 
as it were, between the states. 

The first question as to this area of anarchy is under 
whose sovereignty does it lie, that of state or nation? 

It is on exactly this ground that we must fight out 
the whole progressive movement. 

If it is to be left to the state it will be found that in 
a sense it does not fall within the states but between the 
states; therefore by the states the question will never 
be solved at all. 

Shall the nation then or shall it not under the Consti- 
tution annex those areas of anarchy between state and 
state, and between state and nation over which there is 
now no sovereignty at all? Where shall we look for 
sovereignty where now no sovereignty exists? 

The question is not one as to where lies absolute sov- 
ereignty. This does not exist in America. The indi- 
vidual qua individual has his inviolable rights and 
responsibilities. As a member of a municipality he has 
others. As a citizen of a state he has others still. In 
those relations in which he is bound to a life larger than 
town, county or state he is and must be held amenable 
to a national fundamental and sovereign law on the simple 
theory that we are a nation and not a bunch of states. 

There is a party of reaction which has decreed that 
there shall be no further development of the Constitution 
of the United States. It is the party which almost pre- 
vented the founding of the nation, and failing, sought to 



THE OLD ISSUE 193 

destroy it; who still want to return to the principles of 
'76 and deny the principles of '87. Under the pleasing 
fiction of "strict construction of delegated powers" they 
would destroy the fundamental principles of democratic 
government, viz., direct representation by the people, re- 
establish the principle of the Confederation, viz., repre- 
sentation through forty-eight distinct and separate 
sovereignties, called states. They would have us believe 
that our fundamental law is an imperfect and inadequate 
national instrument closed and sealed when the fountains 
of inspiration were dried up over a hundred years ago. 

Was it not Comte who declared if God was nearer 
the world in ages past than He is to-day, He is not the 
God of the Future? And can we not say if the people 
were sovereign a hundred years ago, and are not sov- 
ereign to-day, we shall be slaves to-morrow? 

The State Right idea is that the Constitution is an 
instrument possessing only such powers as have been 
surrendered by thirteen or by forty-eight states to meet the 
requirements of the eighteenth century ideals; and that 
these powers are only such as are enumerated specifically 
and construed literally, even though they be inadequate 
to meet the necessities of our present national organiza- 
tion, to say nothing of those unknown issues which lie 
hidden away in a destiny unrevealed. Their contention 
is that all our new problems must be met piecemeal and 
solved in fractions. 

It lay beyond the range of any human foresight less 
than omniscient for the framers of the Constitution to 
make provision for such new problems as have presented 
themselves to this more complex age, to say nothing of 



194 THE NEW POLITICS 

those which still lie undeveloped, and even unguessed, 
in future times. It was quite impossible for them to see, 
for example, the growth of modern corporations and 
trusts and to make constitutional provision for their 
control. They make no allowance for future annexation 
of territory or for any kind of public improvement. No 
specific powers were given to Congress to deal with these 
or any such questions. How could the framers of the 
Constitution, who never saw a railroad, a steamboat, a 
telegraph, a telephone, an air ship, a steel warship, or a 
machine gun, frame an unalterable, inflexible, and ada- 
mantine instrument as efficient for the expansions and 
complexities of coming centuries as for their own simple 
bucolic world? It is beginning to seem necessary to 
some of us that in building for a far away future, if 
our forefathers have not made provision for the devel- 
opment of such an organism as may survive the tests of 
experience, that it is quite time we were doing the thing 
ourselves. It has been borne in upon us pretty clearly 
not only that there are concerns which affect all Ameri- 
cans and which are national concerns, but that they are 
outside the reach of the states; and even if they are not 
they cannot be successfully treated piecemeal as, for 
example, from forty-eight points of view, and each point 
of view necessarily different from all the others. 

The impossibility of ever getting forty-eight different 
legislatures to deal unanimously and simultaneously with 
common vital national concerns has brought the Ameri- 
can people to face the necessity of enlarging the sphere 
of nationality as a measure of self-defense. 

How are we and how are future generations to deal 



THE OLD ISSUE 195 

with national problems, needs, necessities, not specifically 
provided for in the Constitution of the United States? 

I am not raising the question of local problems, but of 
those which are national or lie outside the boundaries 
of the interests of a single state. 

The whole question was raised definitely at the White 
House Conference of Governors in 1908. Mr. W. J. 
Bryan is reported to have said, "There is no twilight 
zone between the state and nation in which exploiting 
interests can take refuge from both." Instead, he fills 
this "twilight zone" with too rosy coruscations of his 
own amiable and optimistic temperament. 

As to this neutral zone (which is a term, by the way, 
I like better than twilight zone), with which earnest 
administrators have had so much trouble of late, and 
where their search parties have discovered so many foul- 
smelling lairs of pillage and immunity, there are many 
who declare with Mr. Bryan that here we need no con- 
stitution ; because some day it will be governed in forty- 
eight sections by a fragmentary altruism and fractional 
patriotism. "Earnest men," continues Mr. Bryan, "with 
an unselfish purpose and controlled only for the public 
good will be able to agree upon legislation which will 
not only preserve for the future the inheritance which 
we have received from a bountiful Providence, but pre- 
serve it in such a way as to avoid the dangers of central- 
ization" — just as we have been doing, perhaps, in the 
dispersion of ninety per cent of the entire wealth of the 
United States among a hundred men known as Wall 
Street. 

"I am jealous of any encroachment upon the rights of 



196 THE NEW POLITICS 

the state, believing that the states are indestructible as 
the Union is indissoluble." 

For my part, I believe it to be sounder democracy to 
be jealous of any encroachment upon the rights of man 
before the rights of the state, and that it is not a ques- 
tion as to the states being indestructible or the Union 
indissoluble; it is a question of finding a sovereign for 
anarchy. It is a question of bringing justice to national 
and colossal offenders whom the states do not and can- 
not reach. Mr. Bryan's vague and sonorous phrases 
mean nothing under analysis but a reaffirmation of 
laissez faire and chance and drift, a denial of reason and 
foresight, that what a few of the best minds have been 
trying to accomplish for a century and a quarter will 
some day happen by itself and all of a heap — when forty- 
eight coordinated state legislatures of "earnest men with 
an unselfish purpose and controlled only for the public 
good" will contemporaneously and simultaneously get 
together and "agree upon legislation" which will "pre- 
serve for the future the inheritance we have received 
from a bountiful Providence." When forty-eight 
popular majorities agree upon one method of preserving 
the inheritance we have received from a bountiful Provi- 
dence, we may believe that the sky will fall and that we 
shall all catch larks. 

When an individualist like Mr. Bryan protests against 
centralization in this sense he is protesting against or- 
ganization. Such a protest tacitly admits that some one 
has neglected to show him the difference between cen- 
tralization and organization; and, furthermore, that he 
is oblivious to the one and only danger of centralization 



THE OLD ISSUE 197 

in this country at this time and that is the centralization 
of capital, which is the direct and net result of the 
democracy of individualism; the outcome of a compe- 
tition so free and untrammeled by national oversight 
and restraint as to have resulted in less than .0006 of 
our population owning 25 per cent of our national domain 
and one citizen owning one eleventh of the nation. 

There are many views as to how and when we became 
a nation. The Constitutional Convention did not — could 
not — declare for nationality. The view of such a man as 
President Walker is not convincing that it all came about 
within the first three or four decades of our history ; nor 
is the purely legal one of Story and Webster and Curtis ; 
nor is that later view which dates nationality from the 
Civil War. 

The nation is still in the making. The fundamental 
question of nationality seems to be still an issue. We 
have not achieved our nationality so long as there are 
national injustices and outrages and indecencies unpun- 
ishable; so long as there are usurpations and exploita- 
tions immune; so long as there are offenses which are 
not named as crimes only because there is no sov- 
ereignty to raise over them the aegis of the law. We 
have not worked out our nationality so long as there is 
any national interest over which the national, funda- 
mental law is not supreme. Therefore, I maintain, that 
the adoption of a constitution can be considered as no 
more than the beginning of a nation. It did not create 
a completed nation. 

The literal text of the Constitution, which one of the 



198 THE NEW POLITICS 

framers said at the time of its adoption, no one expected 
would be held for a hundred years, was a compromise 
with the advocates of individualism, state rights, and the 
Articles of Confederation. This is not the Constitution 
of the United States to-day. No one will pretend that 
anything connected with an institution is the same to-day 
as it was a hundred and twenty-five years ago. The 
adoption of the Constitution was the beginning. We 
have been adopting and adapting ever since. 

Who has the hardihood to claim the Constitution of 
191 1 is the same as the Constitution of 1787? If it is 
not the same why has it been changed? And how 
has it been changed? Why, indeed, if not to meet 
the intelligent demands of an intelligent people ex- 
panding to a larger life, meeting new problems and 
crises arising from new conditions? Is not the incon- 
gruity of the position apparent even to a strict con- 
structionist who adheres to the letter of the dead instead 
of the spirit of the living, while his master, Jefferson, the 
chief of all strict constructionists, advocated a brand 
new constitution every nineteen years ? Not the loosest 
constructionist would to-day dare advocate so radical 
a policy as Jefferson's (unless he were a strict construc- 
tionist and individualist — that is to say, one who has no 
political principle regulating what he thinks and says 
and does). 

Our fundamental law is in evolution. Indeed, every 
living thing is in evolution. Therefore, nationality is 
still incomplete. It is not a question of what the text of 
the Constitution explicitly declares. It is not a question 
as to whether the states were sovereign or not. The 



THE OLD ISSUE 199 

time has come when we must take a larger view of our- 
selves and a broader interpretation of our nationality. 

Either the Constitution is a fixed and limited instru- 
ment, incapable of expansion or growth, or it is a living, 
growing instrument of a living, growing nation. If it 
is the former, another half century will find us with the 
most inadequate constitution in the civilized world. If 
it is otherwise, America may achieve its manifest destiny 
and future centuries will remain unshackled to an age 
which did not dare proclaim nationality in the new con- 
stitution; an age which nearly lost its constitution over 
such trivial pretexts as conflict of interests between the 
oystermen of Maryland and Virginia. The only ade- 
quate theory of our national government is that it began 
in the adoption of the Constitution which it was impos- 
sible to frame at one time for all time ; to meet the new 
problems of the new ages which lay out before a nation 
just beginning to be, and already destined to be great. 
The population of the whole nation then was not as large 
as that now of Greater New York. None of the revo- 
lutions had been wrought which were about to transform 
the world in that scientific century which in the material 
welfare of man was to accomplish far more than had all 
the ages since Lot's wife got out of Sodom. 

If the fathers had a right to question their institutions, 
we have a right to question ours. If they had a right to 
protest against the anarchy of State Rights and repudi- 
ate the Articles of Confederation, we have a right to pro- 
test against the anarchy of modern times and construe 
a constitution — or make one — which is large enough for 
the needs of a hundred million people. We have the 



200 THE NEW POLITICS 

right to construe our fundamental law on established and 
accepted principles of construction, to suit the peremp- 
tory necessities of a growing nation. The Constitution 
of the United States is a document no more sacred to-day 
than were the Articles of Confederation before it ; except 
as the former instrument better serves the welfare of the 
American people. The Constitution was not made as an 
idol. It is not something to be worshipped in and of 
itself. It is an instrument to "promote the general wel- 
fare." Some of us have forgotten this. We have rested 
our case with the "fathers" — what they taught — what 
they wrought. Their children who have grown gray — 
and theirs who are growing gray — these do not count. 
Those who have taken this view conceive a nation as a 
mechanism, not an organism of which no provision can 
be made for growth. 

By the way of parenthesis, it may be said here, that 
one of the most undemocratic of modern tendencies is 
the disposition of our people to assail those who have 
dared to criticize the Supreme Court of the United States. 
There seems to be an unwritten law of lese-majeste. It 
has been supposed hitherto that our Government, like all 
Gaul and some other trinities, is divided into three parts, 
the Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, but some would 
add — "the greatest of these" is the Judiciary. We might 
admit that. But when the people assail the President and 
Congress — even the Speaker — the way they do without 
recourse; now and then, when some one dares to ques- 
tion the judiciary, he is belabored to the land's ends, it 
is quite the moment for asking a serious question or two. 
Nothing that I know underneath the throne of God is 



THE OLD ISSUE 201 

immune from honest criticism. Some have even dared 
that. They have criticized the Bible out of our educa- 
tional system — they have criticized the Church to the 
background — everything has had its whirl in the crucible 
but the throne of heaven and the Supreme Court — a 
fruitful thought when you know one may be occupied 
by Almighty God and the other by a corporation lawyer. 
Nevertheless, our Supreme Court is the best thing in 
America. Even then, when any human institution be- 
comes too holy to be criticized, it is time for that insti- 
tution to be abolished as dangerous to the liberties of 
the people. 

We are only a century old. How trite but how true 
that this is but a moment in the aeons the North Ameri- 
can Continent is to play in the history of the human race. 
From Washington to Taft — the span of two fingers out 
of infinite reaches of time! Who would mold 
gyves for the expounding future? We are not what we 
were when Columbus discovered America — when the 
English fought the French — when the Colonials fought 
the English — when Americans fought each other. We 
are what we are this and no other day. We cannot 
shackle the wrists of posterity nor shall our ancestors 
shackle ours. Our nation is not a machine. It is a 
growing organism. This growing organism is the ulti- 
mate factor, not the instrument of its welfare. This 
instrument must be an elastic instrument, or, like Goethe's 
vase, it will be broken by the acorn planted in it. 



CHAPTER II 

NATIONALITY AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 

One of the most important departures from the par- 
ticularism of the fathers was that when the question was 
raised by Maryland of a national domain outside the 
jurisdiction of the state and under that of Congress. 
The importance of this was not realized at the time, but 
it was a revolutionary principle. Maryland asked Con- 
gress to determine the western boundaries of such states 
as claimed to extend to the Mississippi or the South Sea. 
Some of the states, like Virginia, claimed enormous areas 
lying west of them and more or less indeterminate. 
Maryland had no such area. 

Gradually there grew to be a district, which had been 
ceded by the states to the National Government. This 
became a national domain. Not only that but it became 
a national domain out of which states might be made. 
It was actually proposed to create new states out of 
this national domain. Not only this but it was proposed 
that the National Government create these states. Not 
only this, but the National Government, which owned a 
national domain, actually created states out of this 
domain. 

The acquisition of Louisiana was a revolutionary pro- 
cedure undertaken by men fresh from the throes of 
revolution. The United States had a Constitution and 
was governed by men who never ceased their protesta- 
tions of adhesion to the principle of a strict construction 



THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 203 

thereof. Let, however, the exigency be of sufficient im- 
portance, let the need be sufficiently great, let the domi- 
nant party sufficiently desire it, and the Constitution 
must be construed to be equal to the exigency and need. 
So it was. 

After the purchase of Louisiana, there was an era of 
commercial and political good feeling during which the 
coonskin cap brigade was pouring over the Alleghanies 
and settling the Far West between the mountains and 
the Mississippi. This great "unconstitutional" act of 
Jefferson's was a brilliant stroke of constructive state- 
craft, but which, by the way, was not his at all, but the 
act of Livingstone and Monroe. 

It may be doubted if Jefferson ever had a purpose 
or a hope toward the acquisition of Louisiana until the 
act was done. His threatening letter to Napoleon, which 
certainly had some influence, was for the purpose of 
keeping Louisiana in the hands of the weaker power. 
The episode is interesting. As Hosmer remarks, "When 
Bonaparte was the one to be frightened and Talleyrand 
the one to be hoodwinked, the 'naivete of the proceed- 
ing becomes rather ludicrous." 

When all the nation but New England had acquiesced 
in the act of the Republican non-Democratic Administra- 
tion in acquiring Louisiana, her representatives argued 
against it and threw themselves across the path of 
national progress in much the same way that the State 
Rights party has done to this day. If the strict construc- 
tion party in power, which was defending an act under 
their theory as unconstitutional, had followed the lead 
of the liberal constructionists, who were combating their 



204 THE NEW POLITICS 

own theories simply because they had become the policies 
of the opposing party; and if the contention of Federal 
New England had prevailed that the treaty-making power 
does not extend to incorporating a foreign people or a 
foreign soil ; and that the words "new states may be ad- 
mitted by Congress into the Union" meant only such 
states as were carved out of the territory of the United 
States at the time the Union was founded, it would have 
meant that we had a Constitution which had forever 
fixed our territorial boundaries, and that we could never 
have had another foot of territory under the existing 
Constitution. 

It was a case of construction by the Executive and 
ratification by the people's representatives and by them- 
selves — with the exception of New England. 

The case of the State Right survivals who would keep 
the Constitution within the iron bands of the letter and 
not the spirit of the fundamental law to-day is very much 
the same old issue, the same old spirit, the same old story. 
But as then, the expanding nation is answering its own 
questions by continuing to grow. When these questions 
are no longer met by the spirit of nationality it will be 
when and because we have ceased to grow. If the 
Jeffersonians could justify their action in 1803 on the 
ground of "sovereign right" and for the promotion of 
the general welfare, why cannot we to-day? 

All the feeble echoes of tearing the Constitution to 
tatters — all the animadversions on Jefferson, who was 
declared by New England to be administering a despot- 
ism in the shoes of Carlos IV — with a passion, too, that 
got New England ready for secession — is a familiar clap- 



THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 205 

trap to-day which imposes on no historian and no 
scholar, but is still efficient with the masses possessed of 
the Jacobin mind. 

Had the New England State Right Federalists had 
their way in Jefferson's administration, with the armies 
of France in Hayti and Mexico, this might have been a 
French Continent ere this. If the stricter theory must 
be maintained and if we have a Constitution which leaves 
the national government powerless in national problems 
undreamed of by the founders, and if those new and 
unexpected national problems must be solved in frac- 
tions by states, and piecemeal by forty-eight legislatures, 
then, indeed, we have not the constitutional liberty of 
which we boasted, but are saddled with an "old man of 
the sea," and face an intolerable situation created by a 
monstrous blunder, which no growing nation can sur- 
vive. 

Every party, and one might almost say every Ameri- 
can politician, has been both nationalist and broad con- 
structionist when it has suited his policies or purposes. 
No President has been more revolutionary than was 
Jefferson in deliberately performing an unconstitutional 
act ; i. e., from the point of view he had always held and 
then held and admitted that he held. But the country 
wanted Louisiana — constitution or no constitution — and 
Jefferson bought it — constitution or no constitution. 

As a matter of fact, the Administrative, the Legisla- 
tive, and the Judiciary of this government have all had 
a hand in the expansion of the meaning of the Consti- 
tution and the powers of nationality, and their acts have 
been acquiesced in by the whole American people, who 



206 THE NEW POLITICS 

can make and unmake governments — and construe con- 
stitutions — and no one can question their right to do 
so without throwing doubt upon the validity of much of 
the most substantial and vital progress we have ever 
made in nationality. 

There has never been any usurpation of authority or 
"abuse" of power exercised by any Executive, or indeed 
by any branch of government, in the history of the 
United States which was legally so unwarranted, reck- 
less, irresponsible, gratuitous, and revolutionary as that 
of Jefferson in more than doubling the area of the 
nation at one stroke of the pen and taking it and its in- 
habitants, without the consent of the governed, into the 
United States forever. 

God bless him for it. 

Why this reckless dictator has not been held up to the 
execration of the particularist disciples of the Jefferso- 
nian democracy of individualism may be accounted for in 
the fact that he was, here at least, a statesman before 
he was a lawyer, a patriot before a pedant. 

What he was, so may others be after him, without 
blame. 

The Louisiana purchase was revolutionary in more 
senses than one. Not only did it open a new future for 
the nation, but it brought up the whole question of the 
public domain in such a way as to change forever the 
question of state sovereignty by changing radically the 
conditions upon which states might be admitted into 
the Union, and by changing, fundamentally, the powers 
of states so admitted. 



THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 207 

By an act of self -acknowledged imperialism Jefferson 
had bought an empire more than 55,000 square miles 
larger than the whole territory of the United States. This 
was added to that Western territory which had been ceded 
by the states and had become a part of the public domain. 
Here was over one half of the national area which never 
had belonged to the thirteen original states. There was no 
question here of prior state sovereignty, for over half the 
nation now had been neither state nor sovereign. It was 
plain, raw, wild land — 883,072 square miles of it. It 
had been a struggling dependency of Spain and France. 
France sold it. It now belonged to the American nation 
— was a part of the national domain as the territory 
ceded by the states was a part of the public domain — out 
of which new states might be and were created. Later, 
other territory was added to this. Out of this great 
Western area thirty-five states have been formed — crea- 
tures of a national government which was made by the 
people of thirteen other states. 

When it is solemnly proclaimed that the powers of the 
national government exercising jurisdiction over forty- 
eight states were delegated by the states, I ask by what 
states? The vaguest dreamer hardly dare affirm that 
constitutional powers have been delegated to the national 
government by the thirty-five creations of that same 
national government. How does the relation of the 
thirty-five states, formed since the adoption of the 
national Constitution, differ from that of the thirteen 
states which existed before that national government was 
formed? Certainly the thirty-five states are creatures 
of the national government. Certainly the thirteen states 



2 o8 THE NEW POLITICS 

are not. Wherefore this gulf fixed within our body- 
politic — this irreconcilable and monstrous theoretical 
anomaly ? 

We see that Congress could and actually did carve new 
states out of this domain, and set them up to arrogate 
to themselves all the pretensions of sovereign statehood, 
claiming equal power and jurisdiction with the thirteen 
original states, flouting the sovereignty of the parent 
nation which created them and made them states. 

The fact that the National Government created new 
states out of a domain of its own, part of which never had 
been under the jurisdiction of the thirteen states — the 
fact that the National Government could and did bestow 
all the powers and dignities of statehood upon them, is 
conclusive proof that the National Government is the 
sovereign government and the state governments are not, 
on the simple ground that one state cannot create another 
state and confer upon it greater powers than itself 
possesses. 

Here emerges a very interesting question. What is 
the difference between the powers of those states which 
the National Government created and those which are 
alleged to have created the National Government? No 
one would dare assume but that each state of the Union 
is on the same footing as that of every other state. 

Let us see just exactly what this State Right theory 
means. 

It means that thirteen states divided thirteen sov- 
ereignties with a nation which they created, with 
which the future thirty-five states had nothing to do, 
except that the thirteen sovereignties passed over a f rac- 



THE PUBLIC DOMAIN 209 

tion of their multiple sovereignty to a national govern- 
ment which they created, which in its turn passed over to 
thirty-five states which it created the sovereignty it never 
possessed. This half-sovereign of delegated and limited 
powers delegates unlimited powers to its own creatures. 

In other words, we have thirteen fractions of original 
sovereignties which the original states possessed and 
thirty-five third-hand sovereignties which nothing and 
nobody ever possessed. 

This theory may pass muster under that theory of 
democracy holding which some one said — was it Talley- 
rand? (it sounds like him) — that he had vast respect 
for the dignity of the people, but very little for their 
intelligence. 

It sometimes simplifies matters for us to find out just 
what we want to find out. Certainly one of the things we 
must settle is whether the Constitution has any powers 
which the thirteen states did not give it, and whether the 
thirty-five states have any powers the Constitution did 
not give them. If so, who gave these powers? Perhaps 
another question equally vital to any clear thinking on 
this subject is to decide whether the people of the nation 
have any powers which the Constitution does not give 
them. 

For the assertion of the principle that such powers 
as belong to the Constitution are delegated to the nation 
by the states I am able to find no authority. It can be 
found neither in the Constitution, nor in the records of 
the thirteen popular conventions which ordained the Con- 
stitution, nor in the supreme judicial interpretations of 
the Constitution for over one hundred years. 



210 THE NEW POLITICS 

This state right and strict construction theory lays 
itself across the pathway of American progress. It may 
be used, and is generally used by the vested interests and 
by invested privilege as a bulwark of immunity. It 
means that if, in the progress of civilization, the increase 
of wealth and population, new crises, situations, or prob- 
lems have arisen which have not been foreseen by our 
forefathers, and are not enumerated in the Constitu- 
tion, it may and must be used to retard the progress 
of the nation. Let no progress be made which has not 
been foreseen and provided for in the Constitution made 
in the eighteenth century. The twentieth century is 
shackled to the eighteenth. 

The whole thing resolves itself into a point of view. 
The choice is between the attitude of nationalist and indi- 
vidualist. 

The nationalist conceives the Constitution as a set of 
principles instead of a set of rules. 



CHAPTER III 

NATIONALITY AND INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 

It is a far cry from the present conservation move- 
ment back to our crass eighteenth century atomism, 
when Madison, Monroe, and Jackson were vetoing bills 
to "promote the general welfare" and were splitting hairs 
over the proposition that it was constitutional to make 
post roads but not wagon roads. What use had the early 
particularists, for example, for such a political institu- 
tion as the Smithsonian Institution, the Congressional 
Library, the Geological Survey, the Department of Agri- 
culture ? 

Washington, in his eighth annual message, had asked 
what institutions could the public purse be devoted to 
with greater propriety than those for the promotion of 
agriculture. "Experience has already shown that they 
are very cheap instruments of immense national benefits." 

How different was Jefferson's attitude. 

Jefferson, in a letter to Stuart, in 1791, wrote clearly 
of the need of local self-government, that states were 
necessary that each might do for itself "what concerns 
itself directly. " He spoke of subdivisions into counties, 
townships, wards, and farms, and added, "Were we 
directed from Washington when to sow and when to 
reap we should soon want bread." 

As a matter of fact that which Jefferson had scorned 
has happened and the farmer is not only directed from 
Washington as to when to sow and when to reap, but 

211 



212 THE NEW POLITICS 

what, and how, and as to a thousand other things as 
well which centralized national state interference with 
the farmer and his methods and crops and products, 
has made scientists out of hayseeds — who constitute now 
a dignified profession instead of occupying a position of 
economic dernier ressort. 

Could the timid spirits of a hundred years ago have 
dreamed of such a centralization of the powers of the 
nation, and of such an enlargement of the areas of its 
jurisdiction, they would have been frightened out of their 
senses, and one can even imagine their bones turning 
over in their graves to-day. And yet the Government 
still lives and is likely to last some time longer. But the 
curious part of it is that the State Right party is still 
alive and the Individualists are crying "No" to every 
affirmative program proposed by the Constitutional party 
of the United States. 

When we remember how feeble was the national senti- 
ment, confined almost wholly to a few like Washington, 
Hamilton, Wilson, and Madison in the days before the 
Convention; and how, to get a Constitution at all, com- 
promises must be made with the Jacobin spirit of the age 
which was so intensely the spirit of eighteenth century 
individualism; and how every principle of nationalism 
was wrested, as it were, from the very large particular- 
ist majority, it dawns upon us why we are a people still 
saturated with ideals of anarchy. Indeed, the wonder is 
that so much has been gained. 

Through the initiative given the cause of a supreme 
and sovereign national government by the Washington 
administration the disintegrating and demoralizing forces 



INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 213 

of particularism were held back long enough for national 
institutions to be precipitated, crystallized, and hardened. 

Jefferson's administration, and those of his democratic 
followers for a quarter century, could not undo the work 
of Washington and Hamilton. 

I have often imagined a reversal of the work of the 
two parties. I have tried to think of Jefferson as the 
first President of the United States. Eight years of this 
spirit following the adoption of the Constitution would 
have made union and democracy forever impossible on 
this continent. The Constitution would not have sur- 
vived as long as the Articles of Confederation, and these 
two Charters of the American Experiment would have 
found their way to some historic library in Europe be- 
longing to a nation sufficiently consolidated and suf- 
ficiently strong to have preyed upon the struggling and 
jealous and not too noble peoples of thirteen states. The 
predictions of Europe would have come true. 

Some of our early history is instructive and will bear 
restudy. In the light of what the Government is doing 
for the people to-day, we seem to be looking into 
the dark ages when we trace the history of the strug- 
gle for internal improvements for over a half century 
of the reign of particularism. There is immeasurable 
pathos in the littleness of the democracy of individual- 
ism which obstructed and thwarted the national senti- 
ment, fostered the sullen and selfish particularism which 
broke all bounds in Jackson's slogan, "To the victor 
belong the spoils" ; placed American political life frankly 
on the individualistic foundations of selfish aggrandize- 
ment, from which it is likely never to recover. 



214 THE NEW POLITICS 

The successors of the Federalists made an attempt to 
remedy the defects laid bare by the War of 1812, which 
revealed the criminal and insensate inadequacy of means 
of internal communication and transportation. Better 
roads and waterways were seen to be desirable in peace 
and necessary in war. Calhoun joined Clay in advo- 
cating a nationalistic interpretation of the Consti- 
tution rivaling that of Hamilton. But the ugly spirit of 
sectionalism was nowhere shown more clearly than in the 
defeat of Gallatin's scheme (1808) for a system of roads 
and canals from Maine to Louisiana, involving a national 
expenditure of $2,000,000 a year for ten years. This 
would facilitate commerce and immigration and con- 
tribute "toward cementing the bonds of union," etc. 
But a majority did not want the bonds of union cemented, 
and this and another appeal in 18 16 were defeated, 
notwithstanding the lessons learned in the war. What 
can be more "edifying" than the legislation for the Cum- 
berland Road? Witness Madison, Monroe, Jackson, 
Tyler, Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan vetoing the simplest 
measures of Congress looking toward internal improve- 
ment, "seeing," as Madison put it, "that such a power is 
not given by the Constitution." Monroe enumerates the 
specific things a nation may do because permitted by a 
Constitution that nation created, in a message in which 
foresight is condemned and hindsight is prohibited. 

This literalism of strict construction is too feeble for 
men of thought and action. The Constitution says you 
may build post roads. But it does not say you may build 
wagon roads. Therefore the presidents of the democ- 
racy of individualism for a half century blocked the prog- 



INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 215 

ress of the nation. Do we not know — did not Madison, 
Monroe, Jackson know — that a wagon road is as much 
within the purpose of the Constitution as a post road? — ■ 
that to have enumerated every item, everything a grow- 
ing nation might do, would be to fill up a national library 
to the exclusion of better material? This puerile and un- 
statesmanlike construction of the Constitution, utterly 
blind to all Marshall was doing to make that Constitu- 
tion the elastic instrument of a living people, found its 
logical result in the sterility of democratic legislation 
and in the final effort of particularism in the sixties to 
make a real nation forever impossible. 

As early as 1775, Washington had projected a scheme 
for inland navigation to Detroit which had not been ab- 
sent from his mind since, as a boy surveyor, he had 
traversed the wilds of Pennsylvania. It was not till he 
had retired to Mount Vernon after the war that, with 
Jefferson, he took up the matter which the war had 
driven from his active attention. He foresaw the future 
of the country as no other American saw it, and he saw, 
too, that such a plan would give security to the citizens, 
increase internal commerce, and cement the bonds of 
union between the Eastern states and Western territory 
which some other power might gain possession of by 
peaceful or warlike means. Washington's unerring judg- 
ment showed itself in his voluminous correspondence on 
this subject, as when he declared that he was looking 
so far ahead as to facilitate transportation so that a large 
American population might be already settled in the Mis- 
sissippi valley before there was "any stir about the navi- 
gation of the Mississippi.' , 



216 THE NEW POLITICS 

But there are a few interesting oases in these arid 
areas. They may be found in the glaring inconsistencies 
of the party of strict construction. We soon find this 
party outdoing Hamiltonian Federalism, taxing whisky 
and stills, creating a national debt, framing a protective 
tariff, chartering a national bank, nearly four times as 
large as that of Hamilton which had met with their 
violent opposition. 

While the Executive and Legislative branches of a 
strict constructionist government had been stretching 
the Constitution to suit party and public purposes, the 
Judiciary was doing the same thing, to Mr. Jefferson's 
dismay. The Executive (during Jefferson's administra- 
tion) was easily frightened by this policy when not 
inaugurated by the Executive itself. But it came his 
turn to frighten the other two coordinated branches of 
government afterward. Mr. Madison arose in his wrath 
and vetoed the presumptions of the national legislative 
when it essayed to build a few new bridges, fill a few 
mud holes, and build a wagon road into the new empire 
being opened west of the Alleghanies. 

Madison, in his famous veto message of March 3, 
181 7, is sufficiently explicit as to his views on the powers 
of Congress being "specified and enumerated in the 
eighth section of the first article of the Constitution." 
Failing to find there the power proposed to be exercised by 
the bill "for constructing roads and canals," "to give 
security to internal commerce," "and to render more easy 
and less expensive the means and provisions for the com- 
mon defense," he vetoed the bill. 

Monroe's papers are much more interesting because 



INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 217 

he goes into the subject in a way (and for a way) that 
would have done justice to a Federalist in his theory of 
sovereignty. 

On May 4, 1822, Monroe vetoed "An act for the 
preservation and repair of the Cumberland road" "with 
deep regret." His contention is beyond dispute that 
"a power to establish turnpikes, with gates and tolls, and 
to enforce the collection of tolls by penalties, implies a 
power to adopt and execute a complete system of internal 
improvement," and would apply as far as to offer at 
least constitutional ground for Mr. Bryan's scheme for 
the nationalization of railroads. "A right to legislate 
for one of these purposes is a right to legislate for 
others." "It is a complete right of jurisdiction and sov- 
ereignty for all the purposes of internal improvement." 

It is unquestionably true, as Monroe maintains, that, 
if even the right of the national government to build a 
culvert or dig a post hole can be maintained, the jurisdic- 
tion and sovereignty of the government is established for 
all purposes affecting the general welfare. So far the 
nationalist agrees with Monroe. 

Perhaps one of our great difficulties has been the one 
which so confused Monroe and most of the earlier par- 
ticularists. In the paper which accompanied his veto 
message of May 4, 1822, he tells Congress that after 
"resisting the encroachments of the parent country" the 
power they tore from the crown "rested exclusively in 
the people." He speaks further of the "new (thirteen)" 
states, possessing and exercising complete sovereignty." 
Speaking of the principle of representation he declares 
that, "It retains the sovereignty in the people." Again 



218 THE NEW POLITICS 

he speaks of the powers of state legislatures and the 
powers of Congress. "They rested on the same basis, the 
people." Then the Confederation became obviously 
necessary and it was in operation eight years as a "com- 
pact," "all of whose powers were adopted in the Con- 
stitution, with important additions" (he neglects to 
mention the more important subtractions), and argues 
that "where certain terms are transeferred from one in- 
strument to the other and in the same terms, or terms 
descriptive of the same powers that it was intended that 
they should be construed in the same sense in the latter 
that they were in the former." He is trying to drag 
the content of the Confederation over into the Constitu- 
tion. After quoting the thirteen articles, and admitting 
their utter incompetency (although they, like the Consti- 
tution, were to be perpetual), he states that the Consti- 
tution was formed by delegates and adopted by con- 
ventions of each state, the credit of which (the enlarge- 
ment of the General Government at the expense of the 
powers of the states) is due "to the people of each state" 
— he better might have said to the people of all the states, 
"in obedience to whose will and under whose control the 
state governments acted." 

But, as a matter of fact, not one of the "state govern- 
ments acted." In each one of thirteen cases a popular 
convention acted. Had the state governments acted there 
would never have been a Constitution like the one we 
have. Had they acted there would never have been a 
surrender of sovereignty. State governments would 
never have consented to the lessening of their own 
powers, and Monroe is right in ascribing the credit of 



INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 219 

this "enlightened patriotism" to the people of the states, 
who came together professedly not as the people of 
states, but as people who wanted a nation — not to con- 
sider matters of local importance, but of national con- 
cern. The state conventions which adopted the Constitu- 
tion were the local uprisings of a people desiring a nation 
and a national government, meeting in state conventions 
because one great popular convention would have 
involved hardships of transportation greater than those 
endured by the Sultan of Sulu on his recent visit to the 
Capital of his country. 

Monroe is sound in his contention that "the people, 
the highest authority known to our system, from whom 
all our institutions spring and on whom they depend," 
formed "the Constitution." "Had the people of the sev- 
eral states thought proper to incorporate themselves into 
one community, under one government, they might have 
done it." Here he again confuses Confederation and 
Constitution. He claims that powers transferred from 
one instrument to the other "should be construed in the 
same sense" in the one as in the other. This cannot be 
maintained. Every article of the Confederation must 
be modified by the statement in Article I that it is a 
Confederacy, and in Article II that "each state retains 
its sovereignty," etc., "and every power, jurisdiction, and 
right which is not by this Confederation expressly dele- 
gated to the United States in Congress assembled" ; and 
Article III, "The said states enter into a league of 
friendship," etc. 

Nothing pertaining to political sovereignty or sanc- 
tion can mean the same under the limitations of such an 



220 THE NEW POLITICS 

ill-conceived and loosely constituted substitute for a 
fundamental law, as it must mean under an instrument 
framed by a people disgusted and afraid of anarchy 
and inspired by the patriotism of nationality, who have 
met to abolish the loose-jointed and incompetent com- 
pact which is not even adequate for a league of friend- 
ship; and to frame the sovereign instrument of a sov- 
ereign people and accouch a sovereign nation. 

Thus : "We, the people of the United States ... do 
ordain and establish this Constitution." 

Nothing modified by the Preamble of the Constitu- 
tion of the United States can mean the same as it would 
restricted by the first three articles of the Confederation. 

Monroe held to the Rousseau theory of a social con- 
tract, which was hardly questioned in democratic com- 
munities in those days — the theory that society was the 
result of a contract made by a people who never 
existed. It was easy, therefore, for him to consider 
the Constitution as the same as the Confederation — a 
compact. On this rock future generations were to split. 

It had not yet dawned upon the age of revolutionary 
individualism, nor perhaps yet has the conception dawned 
upon the world, that the birth of a nation was no figure 
of speech, but that in a real deep sense something organic 
had come into being. Here lies the impassable gulf 
between eighteenth and twentieth century thought. 

The political anomaly of to-day is the survival of the 
old ideals and ideas and the failure of their belated 
devotees to justify them to modern thought; who con- 
strue the problems of an organism in the terms of 
mechanics. 



INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 221 

Speaking of the parties to the "compact," Monroe says 
the people "are the sole parties and may amend it at 
pleasure." Why can they not construe it at pleasure, 
if it is done by Marshall's rule — not unconstitution- 
ally? If it is a compact or a contract, or what not, 
and if the people are sovereign, why can they not say, 
"We can amend this Constitution as we please, and we 
can construe it as we like, and we can dictate the methods 
of construction and amendment"? We the people! Who 
are we the people? We the living people or the dead 
people? Are we forever chained to the corpse of the 
past or must we think and act for ourselves and for the 
unborn ? 

That is a profound observation of Monroe: "There 
were two separate and independent governments estab- 
lished over our Union, one for local purposes over each 
state, by the people of the state, the other for national 
purposes by the people of the United States." Monroe 
recognizes no areas of anarchy such as have been devel- 
oped by the complex conditions of modern national life, 
over which neither state nor nation exercises supreme 
authority. "The national government begins where the 
state government terminates," he says. He does not 
say the state governments begin where the national 
government terminates. The state government was 
established by the people of the state "for local purposes" 
and the national government was established by the 
people of the United States "for national purposes." 
"The great office of the Constitution, by incorporating 
the people of the several states to the extent of its powers 
(over national purposes) into one community, and ena- 



222 THE NEW POLITICS 

bling it to act directly on the people, was to annul the 
powers of the state governments to that extent," viz., 
it keeps the powers of the state government entirely 
within the scope of "local purposes" which concern the 
people of that state and that state alone. 

"It is owing to the nature of its (the Constitution's) 1 
powers and the high source from whence they are derived 
— the people — that it performs that office better than 
the Confederation or any league which ever existed, being 
a compact which the state governments did not form, to 
which they were not parties and which executes its own 
powers independently of them." 

Monroe then reveals an irreconcilable breach in his 
argument. 

He makes much of the fact that sovereignty was 
divided into thirteen equal parts by the revolution and 
distributed among thirteen commonwealths, arguing that 
they retained all that was not explicitly and concretely 
given up by these states to the "compact" of Union. 
His sovereignty of the state cannot be harmonized with 
the sovereignty of the people with their own dual form of 
government, the one by the state "for local purposes" 
and the other by the nation "for national purposes." 
If the nation was formed by the sovereign people of the 
nation which was formed to provide a national, funda- 
mental law for "national purposes"; on the ground 
that the people is the ultimate sovereign, their own 
fundamental law is sovereign over every national con- 
cern and for every national purpose, and Monroe 
cut the ground from under his own feet in his veto of 
the bill for the Cumberland road. It follows that the sov- 



INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 223 

ereign people of a nation, sovereign for all national 
purposes, must possess a fundamental law adequate to 
all national purposes; that it has the right "to establish 
turnpikes with gates and tolls, etc.," and that if it has 
these rights it has the right of "jurisdiction and sov- 
ereignty for all the purposes of internal improvement. " 

If this is granted the sovereign nation has the right 
of jurisdiction over all national concerns. It "begins 
where the state governments terminate." That is, it 
begins where "local purposes" end and where "national 
purposes" begin, and it does not end till "national pur- 
poses" end. 

The nationalist of the type of Justice Wilson clings 
steadfastly to the essential principle of home rule for 
local purposes. The principle is one of the foundation 
stones of the two great nations of the North American 
Continent — that of local self-government. No national- 
ist will deny this. What he denies is that local power is 
sovereign over national concerns. The point is clearly 
brought out by the British writer, Oliver, in his work on 
Hamilton, perhaps the most intelligent piece of writing 
on American politics published in this generation. He 
says (p. 190), "Between the fanatics for State Rights, 
whom we condemn, and the upholders of the dignity 
and utility of local authorities, whom we have been taught 
to admire, there is, in fact, only a difference in degree. 
A commonwealth in which this spirit had ceased to exist 
might be safely marked as a dying race ; but in the view 
of the statesman it can never be allowed the upper hand. 
Like the steam in the boiler it serves its purpose by its 
effort to escape from imprisonment and control; but if 



224 THE NEW POLITICS 

these efforts are successful, there is an end of the 
utility." 

We see in Monroe, up to the point of application of the 
principle to a policy unpopular with his party, a total 
agreement with that wisest of nationalists, Justice Wil- 
son, but who was enough of a democrat to advocate the 
election of both houses of Congress by the people; who, 
indeed, as has been said, was the first man in American 
history who believed both in democracy and nationalism. 

He kept the distinction clear between a national gov- 
ernment, which was supreme in national affairs, giving 
the states home rule over home affairs, and a national 
government which would swallow the state government 
and annihilate the rights of states. As Monroe did after 
him, he insisted that both national and state governments 
were derived from the people. "The general govern- 
ment is not an assemblage of states, but of individuals, 
for certain political purposes — it is not meant for the 
states, but for the individuals composing them : the indi- 
viduals, therefore, not the states, ought to be represented 
in it." He distinguished sharply between the state and 
government. Sovereign power is not lodged in the Con- 
stitution, but in society — the people. In a nutshell, the 
state government is supreme for local purposes, and 
derives its sovereign power from the people. The 
national government is supreme for national purposes — 
purposes "to the direction of which no particular state 
is competent" — and it derives its power from the sov- 
ereign people. 

The Articles of Confederation were undemocratic in 
not recognizing this principle — that the source of all 



INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS 225 

power lies in the people — and it is from the Articles of 
Confederation we derive that form of State Right senti- 
ment to this day. 

So far Monroe holds with Wilson. How then he could 
veto the Cumberland Road Bill is not easy to understand. 

"Whenever an object occurs" said Justice Wilson, 
"to the direction of which no particular state is compe- 
tent, the management of it must of necessity belong to 
the United States in Congress assembled" (Works I, 

558). 

This is a clear statement of the logic of nationality. 



CHAPTER IV 

BACK TO THE PEOPLE 

There is no more striking development of modern 
political history than in the paradox that Jeffersonian 
democracy has been the feste burg of the instinct of 
despotism, while the "aristocratic" and monarchic (?) 
ideas of Washington and of Hamilton have safeguarded 
the principle of true democracy — government by and of 
the people. 

The pathetic fulfillment of the promises of eighteenth 
century individualism, which shrieked its paltry lies — ■ 
"liberty, equality, fraternity" — culminated early in 
France in the Red Terror and the Rule of Napoleon, 
while in the United States it found expression in the 
institution of human slavery, the aristocracy of the 
South ; the doctrines of nullification and the denouement 
of Civil War, and just now in the multibillionaire. 

A tragic dawn of millennium truly for so brilliant 
a promise! 

But there could have been no other outcome of politi- 
cal atomism, for at bottom the economics of individual- 
ism means free competition, where the big eat the little, 
and to-day we have one man owning or controlling 
one eleventh of the entire national assets ; while in poli- 
tics it means that might makes right and has crystallized 
in boss rule. 

When the Tories left for Canada, which migration 
was an irretrievable loss to the new nation, the people 

226 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 227 

split into two parties over the Constitution. The little 
states wanted to count for as much as the big states and 
were for State Rights, state representation, state election 
of national officers which should represent states, not 
people; and they declared for state sovereignty and weak 
national government. 

The national party, which would have been largely 
recruited by those who became the United Empire 
Loyalists of Canada, and who, had they stayed, would 
have become loyal Americans (for it was their nature 
to be loyal), stood for popular elections, proportional rep- 
resentation, a sufficient national government, and the sub- 
ordination of the parts to the whole. This was the party 
of real democracy. Not that party hiding behind revo- 
lutionary phrases, while gathering to itself the forces 
which made for nullification, secession, and human 
slavery — this party of Rousseau and Robespierre, 
Thomas Jefferson and Jefferson Davis. 

One of the vital questions of the early days was that of 
sources of political power. Whence shall we derive it? 
The Jeffersonian particularist Jacobin party said, "from 
the state" — thus saith this party of "liberty, equality, 
fraternity," this party of "popular sovereignty," this 
"democracy," owning slaves. 

"From the people," said the party of Washington; 
said the "friends of Monarchy" : these aristocrats who 
would not join France in a war against England out of 
"gratitude" to the assassins of their allies. "From the 
people," said the nationalists. "Who shall elect the 
national officers?" "The states," said the "democrats," 
"The people," said the "aristocrats." "On what basis?" 



228 THE NEW POLITICS 

"Thirteen to one," quoth the "democrats." "Upon the 
people of the states in proportion to their number and 
not the number of the states," said the national party, 
enfranchising slaves. 

Down here in this twentieth century we are wiping 
away one of the last of the compromises with the aristo- 
cratic principle, and we are going to let the people elect 
the Senate. It is bad enough that the smallest state 
should furnish as many as the largest. It is a survival 
of the State Right idea. 

These little states then formed an anti-party who op- 
posed the nationalists, declaring preference to submit to 
foreign power rather than accede to the principle of pro- 
portional representation. State jealousy became the stum- 
bling block and was the cause of the survival of the 
doctrine of state sovereignty. The statesmen of the con- 
vention who wanted a Constitution under which govern- 
ment would be really democratic — i. e., kept next to the 
people; i. e., deriving power directly from them and exer- 
cising authority directly over them — were crowded by the 
little state jealousies into a compromise with the demo- 
cratic principle. Hence the modern Millionaires' Club on 
Capitol Hill. 

The earlier statesmen of the nation foresaw the dim 
outlines of how a people devoted to the philosophy of 
egoism, or "enlightened" self-interest, would work out 
their destiny on anarchistic lines and without the principle 
of national self-control. They saw that a people to 
whom their theory of life was justification of their own 
selfishness would soon evolve a despotism along what- 
ever line their daily life proceeded, simply because laisses 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 229 

faire offers no control of the strong and cunning, and 
the weak perish and the strong win. 

The first phase of this struggle in this country was 
over this question of representation. On this the little 
statesmen got together. Their position was prompted 
by unequal proportions of local jealousy and universal 
Jacobinism. The statesmen saw that any really demo- 
cratic institutions must provide for the direct operation 
of the fundamental law upon the people instead of the 
state, and that this law must receive its sovereign 
authority from the people and not from the state. 
Indeed, had not the old government of the Confederation 
failed because it operated on states; because it could 
,not punish states; because it derived its scant authority 
from them? To be sure the demand that the new con- 
stitutional government should act upon and proceed 
direct from the people was revolutionary. But then the 
late war was none the worse because it had been revolu- 
tionary. It must be tried. 

Delegated powers meant also delegated representation, 
and this, at least, must not be handed over again to 
states. In other words, there could be no adequate 
democratic government until the barriers were battered 
down between government and people and people and 
government. The clumsy and artificial instrument which 
represented nothing but thirteen units, and represented 
them to no efficient purpose, and with it the aristocratic 
principle involved, must give way to a government on 
democratic foundations directly in touch with every 
person in the nation. It is a curious fact in the irony of 
logic, as well as the irony of history, that the aristocratic 



2 3 o THE NEW POLITICS 

principle represented in the aristocratic party of the 
United States Senate, which represents the states and 
not the people, should have been a compromise in pro- 
pitiation of the party of the democracy of individualism. 

This undemocratic principle of state representation in 
place of popular representation was a fatal defect. It 
was fatal not only because it denied the fundamental 
principle of democracy, but because it did not contain 
the principles which were adequate to a national life. 
For instance, the Congress could make treaties and nego- 
tiate loans with foreign Powers, but always with a feel- 
ing that thirteen quarreling sovereignties, bound to- 
gether in a "league of friendship," might find themselves 
nullifying their action and repudiating their foreign obli- 
gations simply because they had come to pulling each 
others' ears in their equal wisdom and superior authority. 
The states were under no compulsion whatever to raise 
money voted by Congress, to perform the part stipulated 
by Congress, or to abide by the promises of the national 
legislature. Congress represented the states, but the 
states flagrantly flouted its plighted faith. Congress 
might promise to pay, but the states might refuse if it 
were the sweet will of thirteen jealous sovereignties. 
The Articles of Confederation were a plaything for 
children. They embodied the principles of the Declara- 
tion of Independence. The instrument was the quin- 
tessence of Jeffersonian transcendentalism and the vehicle 
of anarchy. 

The convention was not proposing amendments to con- 
federation, but abolition of the confederation. It offered 
an entirely new instrument for an entirely new govern- 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 231 

merit, which must go, and did go, to that source of 
political power which created every state; the power 
which had given them the right to enter the compact of 
confederation, which could abolish that confederation, 
and which could and did set up a revolutionary govern- 
ment. 

Thus the second American revolution was achieved. 

It was ordained that the Constitution should be the 
fundamental law of the people of such states as those 
whose people might adopt it. This was recognition of 
state sovereignty only so long as such a state might 
refuse to assent to the Constitution. As a matter of fact, 
each state was, until such a time, practically a sovereign 
state, but when the people of that state voted for the 
fundamental law that status was changed on the ground 
that in this act the Constitution had the full and direct 
authority of the people. 

It was necessary to establish the principle that final 
authority rests with the people. If it ever became neces- 
sary for the nation to restrain or harmonize the states, 
under powers which the very theory of nationality 
demanded, it must be done on the established proposi- 
tion that the authority of all the people exceeds that of 
a thirteenth part thereof. There was no room for this 
proposition under a theory of a mere union of sovereign 
states. That union had been tried. It had failed to 
interpret the fundamental idea of democracy established 
by the Revolution because its remote and feeble powers 
depended wholly upon thirteen separate pleasures. There 
were no adequate sanctions. No measure could be exe- 
cuted but with the separate approval of each of the 



232 THE NEW POLITICS 

states. Such a situation was monstrous, and to con- 
tinue it was folly. 

Then it was that the Washingtonian Federalists came 
forward with the real democratic theory of the state, 
and it is a matter of surpassing interest to note how 
the Hamiltonian philosophy saved the Jeffersonian in- 
stinct to keep people and government close together. 

The Constitution of the United States was a national 
protest against the anarchy into which the country was 
drifting. It was enacted to make one nation with a 
common good out of thirteen nations with uncommon 
grievances; to harmonize clashing interests and "pro- 
mote the general welfare." Party lines diverged here 
and the issues were clean cut. 

One after another of the wise men saw the insuper- 
able difficulties in the immediate future, and began to 
pave the way for a constitutional convention. Webster 
wrote, in 1785 (Sketches of American Politics), "There 
must be a supreme power at the head of the Union 
vested with authority ... so long as any individual 
state has power to defeat the measures of the other twelve 
our pretended Union is but a name and our confedera- 
tion a cobweb." 

Madison wrote (Writings, Hunt's Edition, vol. 2) : 
"An individual independence of the states is utterly 
irreconcilable with the idea of an aggregate sover- 
eignty." 

He proposed a middle ground, "without the interven- 
tion of the states" supporting the supremacy of national 
authority and leaving "in force the local authorities as 
far as they can be subordinately useful." 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 233. 

There was no thought in his mind, at that time, of 
their being coordinately useful. 

That notion came when he wanted office. 

Hamilton called for a federal government adequate 
to the exigencies of the Union, and Washington declared 
there must be an indissoluble union of all the states under 
a single federal government, which must possess the 
power of enforcing its decrees. 

The idea which arose steadily out of the surrounding 
chaos of individualism, and which began to guide the 
deliberations of the people, and later of the Constitu- 
tional Convention, was that the individuals of the nation, 
and not thirteen centralized governments, should and 
must be the constituent elements of any lasting unity. 
It was felt from the failure of the Confederation, from 
the impotency of Congress, from the jealousy of the 
states, from the want of a central government with more 
power of taxation, from the lack of power in Congress 
to legislate for the new states to be formed from the 
Northwestern lands, that the underlying faults of the 
Confederation were fundamental and that such govern- 
ment as there was was one for states in the capacity of 
sovereign states and wholly without authority to reach 
directly the individuals of the nation. 

To be sure, Jefferson and a few radical particularists 
held that the Articles of Confederation could be patched 
to serve all needs because he wanted no national govern- 
ment other than a department for foreign affairs, and 
that a cheap one. 

But the large majority felt that the Confederation had 
failed and that their experience had taught them this much, 



234 THE NEW POLITICS 

that so far as national legislative powers were concerned 
they must be supreme in two fields — where the states 
are incompetent and where state legislation would inter- 
rupt the harmony of the Union. They went further, 
and unanimously agreed that the Supreme Court, under 
its powers, could make void such legislation as was con- 
trary to national need or the general powers of the funda- 
mental law. It was clearly seen that this meant nation- 
ality; and that the logic of nationality would play havoc 
with the theory of State Rights ; and that when its prin- 
ciple was established and accepted that the supremacy 
of the Constitution of the United States was that against 
which no separate state power can be exerted, the doc- 
trine of state sovereignty was finally annihilated. 

Yet after this principle was established, and after it 
was admitted that, should it be established, the State 
Rights doctrine would be demolished, the supporters of 
State Rights revived the old issue and have contended 
for it from that day to this, and, queerly enough, on 
a theory of strict construction they have been trying to 
read into the Constitution that which the loosest inter- 
pretation could not extract from it. That the majority 
of the f ramers were right is clear from the consideration 
that such independence as a state may have is not inde- 
pendence of the Constitution, but in and through it. As, 
indeed, the freedom of the individual is not freedom to 
disobey the law but to walk in avenues opened up by the 
law and respect the fences built by the law. On this 
principle the state, even in local concerns, cannot be 
sovereign over the will of the whole people, else Bu- 
chanan was right when he claimed the states could not 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 235 

be coerced by Congress, and Madison was wrong when 
he claimed that republican liberty could not exist under 
some of the abuses of certain states, and even some mat- 
ters of internal local state legislation must be restrained 
by the national government. 

One of the first questions arising in the Constitutional 
Convention was this question of the people or the states. 
Was the new instrument to be ordained by the people 
or by the states for the people or for the states? The 
way these questions were answered was to decide whether 
it was a nation to be created or the patchwork of a 
confederacy to be continued. It must be remembered 
that up to this time, politically speaking, there was no 
American nation, and never had been. There were 
thirteen American nations. All of the people belonged 
to one of these thirteen American nations, except the 
few straggling pioneers who had wandered into the 
forest beyond the Alleghanies. Up to this time these did 
not count. The only way the vast majority of the people 
could conceive of anything important being done was 
by or through states, since there was no nation, unless 
there were thirteen. The only possible way, therefore, 
by which anything could be done was through the 
machinery of states. This fact is the more emphasized 
as we remember the difficulties of communication, and 
that it took longer in those days to go from Boston to 
New York than it does now to cross the Continent. 
Much of the significance of state action regarding this 
whole constitutional movement may be attributed to con- 
venience and geography. The extraordinary difficulty 
and expense of getting the whole people together in any 



236 THE NEW POLITICS 

adequate representation, in one place and one conven- 
tion, were prohibitive of that method. 

I fear too many of our assumptions have been founded 
on Madison's famous argument in the Federalist on 
"The Constitution Strictly Republican, 3 in which he con- 
cludes that the act establishing the Constitution will not 
be a national but a federal act, "because the Constitution 
is to be founded upon the assent and ratification of the 
several states derived from the supreme power of each 
state — the authority of the people themselves." 

The vital distinction between "the states" and the 
"supreme authority of each state" (which, by the way, 
makes or unmakes states), the distinction between crea- 
ture and creator, seems to have escaped the attention of 
Mr. Madison. 

The argument was doubtless put forward in order 
to win votes for the Constitution from those who were 
afraid of the very idea of nationality, and jealous of 
every encroachment upon that rampant individualism of 
the day which so nearly made a Constitution of the nation 
impossible. It is worthy of note that while Hamilton, 
who drafted the Annapolis report, recommended a Con- 
stitution which should be agreed to by Congress and 
afterward confirmed by the legislatures of every state 
(Elliot's Debates I, 118), Madison (Writings, Hunt's 
Edition, 361-69) argued that it was one of the vices of 
the political systems of the United States that the rati- 
fication of the articles should be made by the legislatures 
and not by the people. It is interesting to see Madison 
going further than Hamilton in this direction. 

As a matter of fact, had the articles been assented to 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 237 

and ratified by the states it would have been through 
their sovereign government, namely, the legislatures of 
the states. As a matter of further fact they were not 
thus assented to and ratified. They went back to the 
people, who make legislatures, governments, and sov- 
ereign instruments, and these the people, not in legis- 
latures, but in convention assembled, ordained the Con- 
stitution and made it a national and not a federal act. 

How else could a national act have been performed? 

It is singular that a man of Madison's acumen should 
have so failed to grasp the meaning of his own words : 
"Derived from the supreme authority in each state — the 
authority of the people themselves." 

How could he admit that there was a supreme author- 
ity in each state behind the state, which created the 
state, namely, the authority of the people; and say that 
the Constitution is to be founded on the assent and rati- 
fication of that "supreme authority in each state" behind 
the state, and which created the state; and that it could 
remain a "federal and not a national act"? 

But this is not altogether to the point. Have we for- 
gotten that Madison's argument was written before the 
Constitution was adopted, that his famous essay is theory 
and not history, and that as a matter of cold historic 
fact the Constitution did not go to the states at all, but 
to the supreme authority in each case, the people them- 
selves ? 

It must be remembered, then, that the Constitution 
was proposed to the people of the states (not to the 
states), for there were no people outside the states; and 
not to the people of the nation, because there was as yet no 



238 THE NEW POLITICS 

nation. There was simply a compact or league of friend- 
ship, dissoluble by consent of all the states as parties. 
The convention suggested that the new plan should first 
receive the assent of the existing Congress, and then the 
assent of Assemblies, composed of representatives ex- 
pressly chosen by the people to act for them qua the 
people in constitutional convention to approve or reject. 

Each one of the thirteen state conventions which rati- 
fied the federal Constitution was a popular convention 
and not a legislature, and, therefore, the people in con- 
vention assembled and not the state qua state ratified 
the Constitution. The instrument was offered to the 
people, and each act of ratification on the part of the 
popular convention of every state adopting the Consti- 
tution set forth plainly that such ratification proceeded 
from a convention of the people of that state. 

To have submitted the Constitution to the states would 
have destroyed the foundations of democracy, direct 
representation by the people. 

This was the fatal defect of the confederation. It 
was separated from the people by the governments of the 
states. When Edmund Randolph, Governor of Virginia, 
presented a plan for a federal Constitution, written prob- 
ably by Madison, he proposed, "that a national govern- 
ment ought to be established, consisting of a legislative, 
executive, and judiciary," and took the first revolutionary 
step toward the annihilation of the old confederation. 
The important distinction between a confederate and a 
national government began to take form. The concep- 
tion of a nation was dimly seen to involve the common 
life and the common good of a united people with 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 239 

national duties as well as national rights. The incompe- 
tency of the old government was felt in that under it 
was neither direct suffrage nor direct representation nor 
direct legislation. It was seen that all state right federa- 
tions must be aristocratic and not democratic forms of 
government at all. The whole argument of the Consti- 
tution, and as well its raison d'etre, deny the theory of 
state rights. This Constitution nowhere asserts, nor 
implies, that each state acts in its sovereign independent 
character as in the Articles of Confederation and in 
the Constitution of the confederacy. Nor as in these 
instruments does it anywhere state that its powers are 
delegated by the states to the Constitution. 
The tenth amendment says : 

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitu- 
tion nor prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states 
respectively or to the people. 

If the implication in the words "nor prohibited by 
it to the states" was a compromise with the reactionary 
particularists of the time, the same amendment still 
leaves the gateway of power open in that these powers 
are reserved "to the people." 

Any rational construction of these words would seem 
to indicate that those powers which concerned sectional 
and local matters are left to the states where they belong. 
And those powers which concern the national interest 
and the public good — or the "general welfare" — are 
reserved "to the people." The strictest constructionist 
might accept this. 

Any other view amounts to the state right theory of 
South Carolina, the theory which brought on the Civil 



2 4 o THE NEW POLITICS 

War, claiming the state to be a sovereign member of 
a sovereign union. The theory is the theory of secession, 
which is the theory of state rights, a theory which derives 
no authority from the Constitution itself. 

The failure of the Constitution to enumerate powers 
the necessity for which the framers could not foresee, 
does not invalidate those powers, otherwise our nation 
could not have survived to this day and could not now 
face the emergencies of future time. But the Consti- 
tution itself has provided for this very thing in spite of 
the theories. 

Article IX reads: 

The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not 
be construed to deny or discourage others retained by the people. 

Note that it does not read, "others retained by the 
states." 

Now, as to these other powers, or rights, not enumer- 
ated in the Constitution and retained by the people, a 
vast body of them have been ordained by the people 
through supreme judicial construction, through supreme 
national enactment, through executive administration 
approved by the people and not prohibited by the Consti- 
tution, and finally by the arbitrament of arms — these 
all have been indemnified by the people as fundamental 
law. 

Even Jefferson said in the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, "The United States of America . . . have 
full power ... to do all other acts and things independ- 
ent states may of right do." 

How anything as plain as Article IX of the Constitu- 
tion could have been overlooked so perversely and so long 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 241 

is a curious fact in an intelligent history. It is a clear 
statement that all the rights of the people are not enumer- 
ated and that those omitted are not disparaged thereby. 
To those who believe that ultimate sovereignty is one of 
the rights of the people this presents a clear case. 

William Blackstone will tell you that "in Britain 
(supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable) power is lodged 
in the British Parliament. . . . The truth is, that in our 
government the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable 
power remains with the people. As our Constitutions 
are superior to our legislatures, so the people are superior 
to our Constitutions . . . the consequence is that the 
people may change the Constitutions whenever and 
wherever they please. This is a right of which no posi- 
tive institutions can ever deprive them" (James Wilson, 
Philadelphia Convention, 1787). 

The basis of Patrick Henry's passionate opposition to 
the Constitution in the Virginia Convention was that 
the Constitution presented a consolidated government — 
a centralized government, instead of a confederacy. He 
objected to the language of the Preamble, "We, the 
People'' instead of "We, the States" on the very ground 
that it meant that the states were not to be parties to a 
compact, but that the people were to be the parties to 
one great synthesizing consolidating national govern- 
ment. And so it was. Patrick Henry claimed this to 
be revolutionary — as if that were argument against it, 
since to be revolutionary was no crime to him so short 
a time before. Patrick Henry correctly interpreted the 
Preamble. The Preamble to the Constitution destroyed 
the doctrine of state rights sacred to the Articles of 



242 THE NEW POLITICS 

Confederation which so ingloriously failed to consoli- 
date a people or create a nation, when our political life 
was so precarious as to cause Washington to say it was 
"suspended by a thread." 

Patrick Henry saw what Hamilton had already seen, 
that the dominating words of the Constitution were its 
first words: "We, the People." Henry saw what Hamil- 
ton also saw, that this beginning struck the note which 
was to be the death knell of state rights. One saw and 
feared, the other saw and was glad that another revo- 
lution had come to pass, that the confederation had 
passed away and a sovereign nation had begun to be. 

And then when the fight in Virginia was won the 
Convention voted that the powers granted under the 
proposed Federal Constitution are the gift of the people 
and that every power not granted thereby remains with 
them and at their will. 

If any American could dispute that final authority 
resides in the sovereign will of the people, surely it ought 
not to be the democrats of individualism, who have made 
so many Fourth of July orations on the sovereign will 
of the people. Here again crops up that inconsistency, 
in which they do not seem to understand the bearing of 
their own claims, in which their individualism surren- 
ders rationality and coherence. However, no one in this 
country will dispute the statement that final authority 
resides in the will of the people. Nationalist and Indi- 
vidualist admit it, nay, proclaim it. The principle of 
the sovereignty of the people is the ground of all self- 
government — national, state, or individual self-govern- 
ment. But the issue between Nationalist and Indi- 



BACK TO THE PEOPLE 243 

vidualist was once whether they were to trace the 
authority of the Constitution back to thirteen separate 
centralized entities called sovereign states, or back to the 
whole people of the nation. 

Marshall held that "the government proceeds directly 
from the people," and that "its powers are granted by 
them and are to be exercised directly on them for their 
benefit," otherwise the Constitution could not have been 
what James Wilson, of Pennsylvania, characterized it, 
"the charter of the People's nationality," or what 
Marshall himself called it, "our ordinance of national 
life." 

However wrong Jefferson may have been on the main 
issue, he had one sublime instinct. He had no philosophy 
— no consistency. But few men ever testified as he testi- 
fied to the sentiment of the trustworthiness of the com- 
mon people ; and the American nation never would have 
been the same had Jefferson never lived or had he, like 
Hamilton, been assassinated in his youth. The nation 
needed him. It can hardly be held successfully that it 
needed so much of him, but Jefferson's instinct to keep 
the government close to the people was sound. His 
instincts were better than his logic. 

The curious thing is that such theory as he had was 
false, false to his instinct and ready to thwart his aims. 
It was the theory of Hamilton and Washington, of a 
government more or less self-centralized, which was to 
hold the nation together and prevent the real centraliza- 
tion of arbitrary power in the uncontrolled preying of 
the strong upon the weak. It was Hamilton's philosophy 
which safe-guarded the instinct of Jefferson. Washing- 



244 THE NEW POLITICS 

ton knew that "influence is not government." Jefferson 
never knew that "sentiment is not government," that 
sentiment without government is anarchy, and that under 
anarchy the big eat the little, and that under anarchy 
there can be no free people. As it was the Hamiltonian 
philosophy which annihilated state sovereignty and estab- 
lished a government directly from the people and not 
through the states, so it was the Hamiltonian philosophy 
later which abolished human slavery and vindicated real 
democracy and the right of all to life and liberty and 
the pursuit of happiness. It is to-day the Hamiltonian 
philosophy which is the champion of the people and all 
the people, against the rapine of anarchy and against the 
uncontrolled exploitation of the uncontrollable central- 
ization of predatory wealth. 



CHAPTER V 

A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 

It was one of the great days in the nation's history 
when John Marshall ascended the Supreme Bench, called 
there just a few hours before Jefferson became Presi- 
dent of the United States — Jefferson, who, had Adams 
not appointed Marshall just at this time, would have 
appointed an entirely different kind of man; and it is 
probable that the whole future development of the 
United States would have been changed in its direction 
and course forever. One of the first things Marshall 
did was to settle by his adamantine reasoning the status 
of the Supreme Judiciary itself. He affirmed that this 
judiciary has the right to construe an issue and to decide 
what is the law which governs in any given case. If 
the terms of the Constitution and those of any legis- 
lative enactment conflict the Court must decide whether 
it will follow the Constitution or the legislative act. 
"But it is essential," says Marshall, "to all written Con- 
stitutions that a law repugnant to the Constitution is 
void, and that the Courts, as well as the other depart- 
ments, are bound by that instrument." Then how 
else could he construe but according to the fundamental 
law? 

As to the state rights contention, the principle is dis- 
tinctly announced and established, and is no longer ques- 
tioned, that any enactment of any state, or even of the 
national legislature in conflict with the Constitution, is 

245 



246 THE NEW POLITICS 

void, and that it is within the power of the judiciary 
to determine this. 

These two principles have been accepted as the expres- 
sion of the will of the American people as distinctive 
American fundamental law. Marshall established this 
principle in spite of the angry and violent opposition of 
Jefferson. The principle has stood to this day, because 
Marshall's reasons for supporting it were final. In the 
summing up of the argument in the celebrated case of 
McCulloch versus Maryland, in 1819, Marshall outlined 
the situation in an unanswerable way. He held that a 
Constitution as prolix as a legal code containing an 
"accurate detail of all the subdivisions of which its great 
powers will admit," could "hardly be embraced by the 
human mind" and "never be understood by the public." 
"Its nature, therefore, requires that only its great out- 
lines should be marked, its important objects designated, 
and the minor ingredients which compose those objects 
be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves." 
"Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of 
the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, 
which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not pro- 
hibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of that Con- 
stitution, are constitutional." 

The struggle for American nationality is one of the 
crowning struggles of the human race. That the ini- 
tiative of Washington's administration was in the direc- 
tion of sound nationality, was no more fortunate than 
that when the JefTersonian reaction began, Marshall on 
the Supreme Bench grasped with such clearness and ex- 
pounded with such irrefutable logic the fundamental 






A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 247 

principles (and it is the literal minded strict construc- 
tionist who fails to grasp them), that if sovereignty was 
delegated it was surrendered and by the people, not the 
states, and to a sovereign instrument; that the people, 
not the states, made the Constitution, and the Constitu- 
tion made the national government ; that this instrument 
holds powers sufficient for all the needs and purposes 
of a national government; and that anything less would 
defeat the aims of the framers of the Constitution and 
the founders of the nation, and would prove inadequate 
to the multiplying needs of a sovereign people. 

The Articles of Confederation formed a union of 
states. The Constitution of the Southern Confederacy 
made a union of states. But the National Consti- 
tution is a bond of union of the People of the United 
States. 

To my mind there is nothing Marshall ever said more 
fundamental, more vital, or more true than this : 

"The people made the Constitution, and the people 
can unmake it. It is the creature of their own will and 
lives by their own will. But this supreme and irresistible 
power to make or unmake resides only in the body of 
the people, not in any subdivision of them. The attempt 
of any of the parts to execute it is usurpation and ought 
to be repelled by those to whom the people have delegated 
the power of repelling it." 

What a different note from that of Buchanan, with 
the nation on the verge of civil war, who, in his message 
of December, i860, while denying the right of secession, 
declared that Congress had no right to coerce a state. 

President Francis A. Walker (The Making of the 



248 THE NEW POLITICS 

Nation, p. 253) interprets Marshall's theory of the Con- 
stitution as an instrument under which the national 
government is not limited in its agencies or methods, and 
has "free choice among all means not expressly forbid- 
den in the Constitution, which are reasonable, expedient, 
and politic means to those ends." Marshall expanded 
"the frame of the government to its proper propor- 
tions." 

Hamilton's doctrine of implied powers is more 
familiar; that "if the power is necessary to the purpose 
of the Constitution it may be implied from powers 
expressed." 

The final establishment of this principle through con- 
struction, one of the most important achievements of 
American jurisprudence, settles the question as to lati- 
tude of construction and as to the elasticity and not ri- 
gidity of that ultimate instrument, the Constitution of the 
United States. It established forever, or at least so long 
as the Constitution shall endure, the principle of develop- 
ment and the possibility of development in spite of that 
class of minds which would fetter a growing vital virile 
present to the corpse of an age a hundred years dead. 

Moreover, it established not only the fact that powers 
enough have been delegated to the Constitution, whether 
by the states or by the people, to confer on the Union 
all the powers of national sovereignty, but that this 
sovereignty lies in the will of the people — the whole 
people — not in thirteen or forty-eight peoples ; and 
that of the whole people the ultimate oracle is the Consti- 
tution of the United States ; that this Constitution is the 
instrument of one State, and not forty-eight states. 



A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 249 

Marshall had said that the people can make Consti- 
tutions or unmake them. The strict constructionist, who 
may object to doctrine so revolutionary, is referred to the 
fact that with an inconsistency characteristic of a party 
which shouted that all men were created free and equal 
and fought the Civil War to uphold human slavery and 
state sovereignty, Mr. Jefferson and his followers, advo- 
cated a Constitution elastic enough to be changed every 
nineteen years; that the majority should make the Con- 
stitution "what they think will be best for themselves," 
and as it were in the same breath, pleaded for a strict- 
ness in construction, for a rigidity of Constitution which 
would make reform exceedingly difficult and progress 
all but impossible. 

It will be urged by the strict constructionist that pro- 
vision has been made for changes in the Constitution 
through amendment. Quite true. But an amendment 
to the Constitution is now almost an impossibility. Pro- 
vision has been made also for change through construc- 
tion — of legislature, executive, and judiciary. 

I fancy there is no one to-day to question the consti- 
tutionality of a vast number of legislative projects "to 
promote the general welfare," and which have no consti- 
tutional ground outside the fact that the entire nation 
has acquiesced in what we may call legislative, or judi- 
cial, or executive amendments to the Constitution, which 
before the Civil War would have been passionately and 
almost unanimously opposed. It is impossible to recon- 
cile the attitude of the strict constructionalists with the 
increasing body of laws enacted for the public better- 
ment. How are we to consider this increasing body of 



250 THE NEW POLITICS 

law finding its expression, if we take a classical example, 
in the whole recent conservation movement of the United 
States passed by the sovereign power of a sovereign 
nation, ratified by the executive, acquiesced in by the 
Supreme Court, applauded by the whole people, with 
no specific warrant in the Constitution of the United 
States, unless these acts are to be considered in lieu of 
amendments to the Constitution, as an expansion of that 
Constitution? Does not the state right theory trip on 
this snag? 

Suppose every legislative act to "promote the general 
welfare," for which there are not specific powers men- 
tioned in the Constitution, were wiped out by the Supreme 
Court? What would we have left? Not a nation, 
surely. 

I fear these state right delegationists have mixed their 
authorities. I do not find a body of doctrine in the 
Constitution justifying their claim. I do find their 
theories certified in the Articles of Confederation and in 
the Constitution of the late Confederate States. I 
quote from the Articles of Confederation of 1781 against 
which the Constitution of the United States was the 
protest of the people of the nation: 

Article II: 

Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, 
and every power, jurisdiction, and right which is not by this con- 
federation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress 
assembled. 

I read the Preamble of the Confederate States of 
America, 1861 : 

We, the people of the Confederate States, each state acting in 
its sovereign and independent character, in order to form, etc. 



A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 251 

But I read in the Preamble to the Federal Consti- 
tution : 

"WE, THE PEOPLE of the United States" (that is the way the 
Constitution begins and spells "WE, THE PEOPLE" in enormous 
old German letters) "in order to form a more perfect union"; 
(that is the first purpose mentioned before the establishment of 
justice or securing the blessings of liberty) "WE, THE PEOPLE 
. . . do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United 
States of America." 

The Montgomery Convention was found explicitly 
acknowledging the principle of state rights and dele- 
gated powers. The Confederacy was formed because 
the Federal Constitution did not so ordain. The South- 
ern leaders claimed to have been satisfied with the 
Federal Constitution, but for "too loose an interpreta- 
tion," though no kind of construction can find the prin- 
ciple of state rights (which of course means state sov- 
ereignty) in the Constitution of the United States. 

It is not altogether parenthetical to state here that the 
Constitution of the Confederacy is a consistent exposi- 
tion of the philosophy of individualism. For example, 
practically everything in the way of state action "to 
promote the general welfare" was prohibited. It ex- 
pressed clearly the democratic theory of the state. The 
state had no moral mission. The sphere of national self- 
government was very much restricted, all but annihilated. 
The principle of nationality was annihilated. 

It was because the South wanted to annihilate this 
principle that it tried to destroy the Union. Protective 
tariffs were prohibited, as were all internal improve- 
ments at the public expense. Grant the soundness of 
their political philosophy and you must justify secession. 



252 THE NEW POLITICS 

Indeed, it is an interesting fact that democrats — those 
who are consistent individualists — have always arrayed 
themselves against the ethical enlargement of the sphere 
of the state — "to promote the general welfare." The vast 
mass of constructive state-building to the credit of the 
constitutional party in the extension of the public con- 
trol over the common good, has been pronounced uncon- 
stitutional by every strict constructionist and held as 
pernicious, theoretically, by every democrat of individ- 
ualism, although advocated and voted for when it was 
good policy to do so. 

Jefferson stated the issue clearly: 

"Our tenet ever was, and, indeed, it is the only land- 
mark which now divides the Federalists from the Repub- 
licans, that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide 
for the general welfare, but were restrained to those 
specifically enumerated." 

"Henceforth," says Schouler, after quoting the above, 
"our national parties were to fight one another upon the 
issue, not of constitutional change, but of constitutional 
construction, public opinion being the only recognized 
arbiter. From 1804 to 1865, a period of much contro- 
versy, culminating in Civil War, not a single consti- 
tutional amendment was proposed by the American 
Congress to the states for adoption; and the thirteenth 
amendment of this latter date registered and confirmed 
a decree which the sword had already executed without 
positive sanction." 

Is it not time to reexamine our opinions of the Con- 
stitution and this question of sovereignty from some 
other than a lawyer's standpoint? 



A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 253 

Each generation must have its own point of view. 
Is it not time for the generation which was born since 
the Civil War to state its case? 

There is a growing party who believe in national self- 
government and in state, county, or individual self- 
government as supplementary and not opposed thereto. 

We conceive of our fundamental law as having 
proceeded from the people. These "people" are not 
thirteen original states. These "people" are not merely 
the people of the thirteen original states. They are the 
people who enacted the Constitution before they died, 
and who construe the Constitution while we are living — 
we the people. 

Professor Hart has stated the case for the modern 
American who believes in American Nationality. "The 
correct view of American Government is that every form 
of government, national, state, or local, emanates from 
the same authority — namely, the people of the United 
States. The fundamental basis of American Govern- 
ment is the right of a people to organize and form 
governments for themselves" (Actual Government, p. 
51). He might have added that the fundamental basis 
of American Government holds the right to construe 
according to the needs of the living rather than in defer- 
ence to the dead. 

Are the states nations? Is the National Government 
their agent? 

It has taken over a hundred years to answer this ques- 
tion, and the question is not yet answered if the present 
state right contentions be well grounded, and if there is 
an area over which neither state nor nation exercises 



254 THE NEW POLITICS 

sovereign control. The nationalist maintains that the 
American nation is a sovereign nation. 

Sovereignty means supremacy. It involves a dominion 
subject to no other dominion. It has authority and force 
subsidiary to no other authority or force. The nation 
involves powers actually belonging separately to none of 
the forty-eight individual states. 

Lincoln once defined sovereignty adequately for all 
practical purposes. He says, "Would it not do to say 
that it is a political community without a political supe- 
rior?" He said further, "Tested by this no one state 
except Texas ever was a sovereignty." 

Assume sovereignty of the nation. Has it a political 
superior in the "sovereign" state? Assuredly not. Has 
it even an equal in the "sovereign" state ? No. 

Assume sovereignty of the state. Has it a superior? 
Assuredly it has. Is it even the equal of the nation in 
authority and power to enforce that authority? In- 
deed no. No state "sovereignty" measures up to that 
test. 

No state possesses this supreme power. A state can- 
not even carry the mails. It cannot coin money, impose 
tariff dues. It cannot grant patents or copyrights. It 
cannot maintain a navy, nor can it declare war or peace, 
nor enter into a treaty with a foreign power; it cannot 
secede. Why? Simply and solely because it is not of 
itself a sovereign power. 

The legislature of a state cannot be said to exercise 
supreme legislation when the very citizens of that state 
owe first obedience to the laws made by another power, 
and when the codes of their lawmakers are null and void 



A WORD ABOUT SOVEREIGNTY 255 

if in conflict with the laws made by another power than 
that of their state or the people of their state. 

The courts of a state cannot be said to exercise supreme 
judicial power when their very magistrates are sworn to 
disregard the laws of their own state when they are in 
conflict with another law passed by another and higher 
legislature, and are subject to construction by another 
and higher tribunal. 

The very Constitution of a state is not sovereign, for 
it is only operative when in consonance with another 
Constitution of another and higher authority. 1 

These are some of the powers without which the claim 
of sovereignty is a ridiculous if not an impudent asser- 
tion ; powers which the people long ago stripped from the 
states with the confederation and wove as one garment 
into the Constitution to cover one people of one nation. 

Sovereign power involves supreme authority and 
force. The supreme law involves the supreme sanction. 
There are no sovereign states, because no state possesses 
a sovereign law with a supreme sanction. This question 
was thought to have been left open by the compromises 
of the Constitution and certain states once alleged of them- 
selves sovereignty and seceded. It was a question then, 
at last, no longer of sovereign law or sovereign construc- 
tion of law, but of sovereign sanction. This question was 
passed up to the next highest of all tribunals — the arbi- 
trament of arms. The Civil War settled the question of 
state sovereignty. The Civil War was the ultimate 
amendment to the Constitution. It settled the question 
of sovereignty. 

1 Andrew Jackson. 



256 THE NEW POLITICS 

The Constitution of the United States is not merely 
the document so called. It is that instrument plus the 
construction in many volumes of the decisions of the 
Supreme Court of the United States plus the construction 
of the people of the United States on the fields of battle, 
where they decided that the nation is one nation, not a 
confederation of states, and that the whole is greater 
than any of its parts. 

Back of this whole question of Nationalism is the 
question of authority. Where lies sovereignty over the 
areas unforeseen and unprovided for in state or national 
institutions — as to the interstate? 

Where lies sovereignty over those areas of anarchy 
between the states ? The extra-state as it were ? 

The question of sovereignty is not one of rights. It 
may be one of right, but ultimately it is a question of 
final authority. Final authority rests with the whole 
people of the nation whose ultimate instrument is the 
Constitution. This Constitution was the beginning not 
merely of union. That had been established by the Con- 
federation. The Constitution went further. It became 
the supreme law of a sovereign people. 






CHAPTER VI 

THE NATIONAL PARTY 

Side by side with the revolutionary ideas into which 
this nation was born another idea has been growing from 
the very beginning of our national existence. It is the 
national idea. 

The history of political parties in the United States 
dates from the moment when men began to draw the 
line between "Strong Government" men and "the Par- 
ticularists" ; those who advocated and those who opposed 
the adoption of the Constitution of the United States. 
The Constitution once adopted, the party lines defined 
the position of those believing in a liberal construction 
which gave the National Government greater power, 
and those who opposed it. The "Particularists" of 1781 
became the Anti-Federalists of 1787. The Anti-Federal- 
ists of 1787 became the Confederacy of i860. The 
Washingtonians and Hamiltonians of 1787 became a 
Nationalist party. 

Every day, for over a hundred years, the American 
people have been moving away from the crass individual- 
ism of the two revolutions, from particularism to Nation- 
alism, and in the direction of the democracy of altruism. 
Even the practical statecraft of our fathers saw that 
anarchy was no fitting foundation for a rational state, 
when individualism surrendered its purity reluctantly 
to government as a necessary evil. There is much said 
of rights in. the Declaration of Independence — nothing of 

257 



258 THE NEW POLITICS 

duties. A century and a quarter have shown its inade- 
quacy as a political philosophy. We compromised our 
rights and recognized our duties when we adopted the 
Constitution of the United States. 

If there is any one thing which will characterize the 
last half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nine- 
teenth centuries in history, it is perhaps the irresistible 
progress of the democracy of individualism. The next 
fifty years furnishes notably the fields where solidarity 
fights out its battles on nationalistic lines in United 
Germany, United Italy, and Great Britain; and in the 
United States when in the sixties we were kept from 
being broken in two — perhaps more. In England and 
America, however, the nineteenth century has been par- 
ticularly the scene of conflict between the democracy of 
individualism and the democracy of nationalism. It 
was not until after the Civil War in the United States 
that the idea became in any large and real sense the 
fundamental American idea, and even then it was not 
recognized — even now it is not sufficiently recognized. 
Nevertheless, the national idea has been transforming 
the American state. It has been informing and mold- 
ing our legislation and administration. It has been 
molding our history. It has been shaping the very 
conditions of American life. 

In spite of all the theories of state rights and their 
corollaries which were held by the vast majority of the 
people (and are indeed to this day), as well as by the 
very inherent logical necessities of the case, the fact of 
national sovereignty has been growing from the day the 
Constitution was adopted until the present time. In one 



THE NATIONAL PARTY 259 

way or another, whenever American politics sees fit to 
revert to a principle, which is not often, it comes back 
somehow to this line of cleavage which during the whole 
history of the republic has divided clearly the Particular- 
ists from the Nationalists. 

There is, perhaps, no better illustration of what I mean 
than that found in the gradual encroachment, I may say 
ethical encroachment, of the sphere of state action over 
the area of personal liberty ; or in other words, over the 
area of anarchy. If the beginnings of the government 
were founded on principles as near anarchy as those 
upon which probably those of any other government has 
ever been founded, we must remember that the very age 
itself was one of revolution. 

The dividing line between the two real parties of the 
United States is that which separates nationalism from 
particularism. If our party platforms will not disclose 
this boundary, let there be a new national party which 
will. Let us have a party built on principles, not inter- 
ests. Whenever it has appeared that such an issue might 
be made there have been those ready to obscure the real 
issue and start the claque for economy or the tariff 
or some other policy which is not fundamental, like 
Alcibiades, when he bought a beautiful dog and cut off 
its tail, "to give the Athenians something to talk about," 
he said, "so that they won't talk about the other things 
I want to do." So modern politicians and bosses 
divert the people to-day by confusing the issue. There 
can never be a free trade party in this country again 
which will be more than a negligible quantity, yet the 
day of legislating for the "infant industry" is done. 



260 THE NEW POLITICS 

When we no longer have to protect ourselves from 
Europe we must protect ourselves from Asia. Already 
a hundred millions more than half the human race, who 
can live on nothing a day and board themselves, have 
entered the lists as producers as well as consumers, and 
our much vaunted trade with the Orient is not only 
already doomed, but we have the most ominous problem 
of the twentieth century to solve, if we save white labor, 
and Western civilization, and the Christian white man's 
standard of living from utter annihilation. 

The tariff problem is on its way out of politics. Some 
day it will be in the hands of scientists and there will 
be stability in business, and there never will be stability 
in business until the tariff is out of politics and is in the, 
hands of scientists and its main outlines at least are set- 
tled as national, not as party measures. 

The real issue to-day is and always has been the one 
between state rights and no duties on the one hand, and 
national rights and duties on the other. I mean state 
rights interpreted as state sovereignty. No one of any 
intellectual weight has ever assailed the principle of state 
rights interpreted as a matter of local rights. The 
nationalist denies state sovereignty. He denies the prin- 
ciple that we harbor an area of anarchy between the 
states, or between the nation and the states where there 
is no Constitution and no law — an area of immunity 
from crime where with impunity the big can eat the 
little and cannot be caught and punished. The principle 
of local self-government is more sacred to the national- 
ist than to the particularist, because he, and not the par- 
ticularism demands that there shall be none of the affairs 



THE NATIONAL PARTY 261 

of men in our Republic where there shall be no self- 
government. 

There are those who believe that this nation is simply 
the agent of forty-eight separate sovereignties called 
states. The nationalist believes that there is one national 
sovereignty for all national and interstate or extrastate 
concerns. But he demands that the affairs of the state 
shall be run by the state; that municipal affairs shall be 
administered by the municipality ; that the affairs of the 
individual are the concern of the individual and that 
in this sphere each man can attend to his own business. 
The nationalist holds to the dual principle, qua principle 
as well as qua expediency. He insists on local self- 
government. But he denies the validity of local self- 
government in those multiplying affairs which pertain 
to our larger relations between sections far apart, and in 
those which pertain to ourselves as units of a great new 
born organic world power. He denies the principle of 
national government piecemeal. In short, he claims that 
all rights and all duties — all affairs — which properly may 
be classified as national affairs, must fall under the aegis 
of the national fundamental law. It signifies nothing 
that powers are not specifically mentioned in the Consti- 
tution to cover issues and events which could not have been 
foreseen by the cherubim and seraphim a hundred years 
ago. The twentieth century must meet its own issues 
and state its own creed. Justice Wilson once said, "The 
general government is not an assemblage of states, but 
of individuals for certain political purposes" (vide Doc. 
Hist. Const. Ill, 208-9, 2 5°)- What are those cer- 
tain political purposes? Let Wilson answer. "When- 



262 THE NEW POLITICS 

ever an object occurs, to the direction of which no 
particular State is competent, the management of it must 
of necessity belong to the United States in Congress 
assembled" (quoted by Elliott). 

This is a reversal of that contention that the states 
have jurisdiction over all objects not enumerated in the 
Constitution. "Whatever," says Elliott (Story of Con- 
stitution, p. 70), of Wilson's views, "in its nature and 
operation extended beyond the individual State ought 
to be comprehended within the Federal jurisdiction." 

The national party has enacted more rational and 
ethical legislation than any other political party in the 
history of the world, excepting, possibly, the reform 
party in New Zealand. Every ethical law, every act 
advancing human welfare which this party has written 
on the statute books of state or nation, without a single 
exception, has been away from individualism and toward 
the enlargement of the sphere of the state — toward the 
centralization and moralization of its powers. It has 
carried out the principle of solidarity and nationalism 
conceived by George Washington and Alexander Ham- 
ilton as an offset to the anarchical tendency of Jefferson 
— tendencies much needed in their day, but which in their 
day fulfilled their mission, and in the sixties more than 
fulfilled their mission. The untimely assassination of 
Hamilton gave the forces of individualism an impetus 
which resulted in the Civil War, and which twenty years 
more of his constructive and organizing effort might have 
checked. When the struggle came and the disintegrating 
forces of our political institutions had gathered them- 



THE NATIONAL PARTY 263 

selves, such an appeal was made to altruism as has sel- 
dom, if ever, been equaled in the political history of 
mankind. The national party was the embodiment of 
the ethical force and sentiment which organized itself 
to respond; to hammer the shackles off three million 
slaves, and to prevent individualism from breaking the 
nation in two. 

The Constitution of the United States was first a pro- 
test against the policies of chance and the politics of 
drift on which the ill-formed nation was swiftly hasten- 
ing toward dissolution. There was nowhere a common 
end or aim, nowhere the recognition of a common life 
and a common good, nowhere a constructive and funda- 
mental idea. 

The Constitution was enacted to outline, not fulfill, the 
fundamental idea; to make one nation out of thirteen; 
to recognize the principle of the common good and to 
"promote the general welfare." It is a set of principles, 
not a set of rules. 

These are the traditions upon which the party of 
Nationalism was founded ; these the principles the party 
has been slowly and surely working out from the day 
the Constitution was ratified until the present time. 
These are the ideas it has stood for and these constitute 
its raison d'etre. 

If it has departed now and then from this principle it 
is because the plunderers of individualism have sought to 
turn this great instrument of altruistic power to serve 
their individual greed. 

This is the principle it opposes to the particularist 
theory of government, which is the policeman's theory — 



264 THE NEW POLITICS 

no more. The national party stands for an ethical 
democracy, which means the extension of the government 
ethically for the good of all the people. It believes, by 
instituting rational and ethical forms, that through these 
and by means of these the whole people, acting together 
with intelligent aim, can better achieve the objects of their 
existence (unless it be conceded that the aggrandizement 
of the clawman is the object of existence) than can the 
individual units of the multitude, in a mad and untram- 
meled scramble, not working together and working with- 
out aim or reason except as each one is propelled to the 
acquisition of materialistic possession, driven by the 
blind instinct of self-interest. 

The party of Nationalism has recognized the principle 
that, whatever might have been the outlook and purposes,, 
and indeed the limitations of the "fathers" in framing 
the Constitution, the people of each generation have had 
their own life and their own problems since that instru- 
ment was drawn up, and that it must be construed to 
meet the present needs of an expanding nation. Such has 
been the change in our world outlook that every step in 
the progress of nationality has been accompanied by cor- 
responding change in the fundamental law. The gen- 
eral necessity for such an adaptation and growth has 
been finely stated by Mazzini : "The supreme power in 
a state must not drag behind the stage of civilization 
that informs it ; it must rather take the lead in carrying 
it higher, and, by anticipating the social thought, bring 
the country up to its own level." 

American nationality has been defined not only by the 
Constitution but by the constitutional practice of nearly 



THE NATIONAL PARTY 265 

a century and a quarter. And constitutional practice, as 
accepted by all the people of the nation, in whom all sov- 
ereign power lies, includes not only judicial but legisla- 
tive and executive construction — also construction by 
the sword. 

So far, nothing is clearer in the development of Ameri- 
can nationality than this, that a century of struggle — of 
a common national life — has clad the skeleton of 1789 
with the flesh and blood of a living thing, and that the 
common life of those who were born to it, rather than 
of those to whom it was born, has breathed upon it the 
living breath of organic nationality. 

The question now is, whether future American history 
shall be written of Nationalism or socialism. Particular- 
ism is played out. Its last word is that the government of 
the United States has been moved from Capitol Hill to 
Wall Street. We have reached the climax of a political 
system based on interests instead of principles — the apothe- 
osis of the boss and the worship of the machine — where 
one man controls an eleventh of the national assets and 
the masses of the employed middle classes cannot afford 
the decencies of life. 

We are ready for a change. 

And the one thing which can save the country from 
socialism is Nationalism — a government of all the people, 
by all the people, for all the people. 

A new era is upon us outlined in its own new problems. 
They are many and they are serious. Some of them are 
ominous. The nationalist is the only man who intelli- 
gently can cope with them. In every great crisis in our 
national history the issue has been between the national- 



266 THE NEW POLITICS 

ist and the particularist, and the nationalist has always 
won and he was always right. He is right to-day. He 
will win to-day. 

Whatever may be the true and ultimate political phi- 
losophy upon which a future millennium may be based, 
the right-minded American statesman will work on lines 
parallel with the American idea; and that idea he will 
interpret roughly, and he cannot get away from it, 
in the general terms of the interpretation given it by 
either George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. These 
two men head the two great American political parties ; 
the two American systems of political thought and every- 
thing fundamental which has been done, or thought, or 
said since their day has followed, consciously or uncon- 
sciously, the lines laid out more than by anyone else by 
the attitude of these two men. Jefferson, as does no 
one else, represents in philosophy, practice, spirit, and 
point of view the democracy of individualism. George 
Washington — the man — his whole moral and intellec- 
tual character — is the incarnation of the democracy of 
Nationalism. 

The line of cleavage between the national and par- 
ticularist parties bisects that separating Republicans and 
Democrats at right angles. There are nationalists North 
and South, East and West, Republican and Democratic 
and Independent, and there are Republicans everywhere 
who cannot think nationally. 

For example, in the ranks of the Republicans are 
the wretched self-seekers, who represent the interests 
entrenched in a slough of particularism and barricaded 
with state rights. Among the Democrats are many men 



THE NATIONAL PARTY 267 

who are nationalists in the highest sense, though they are 
individualists, also, in the highest sense. The recent 
Marshall redevivus, with all the literature of more than 
a decade, which calls national attention again to the 
forming and framing of the new nation by the construc- 
tion of a statesman jurist rather than the obstruction 
of the legal Pharisee, grew out of what has proved 
almost an epoch-making address, delivered by General 
John C. Black, President of the United States Civil 
Service Commission (then United States Attorney), be- 
fore the Illinois State Bar Association in the nineties, on 
"John Marshall." General Black, whose funeral sermon 
had been preached at home twice during the Civil War, 
when he had been shot, as was thought, to death, is one 
of those who have cemented with their own blood what 
Marshall taught, the sovereignty of the nation, and not 
the state, and who has always been a patriot and states- 
man before a politician. 

"The adoption of the Constitution," says General 
Black, "was itself only a single step toward the habita- 
tion of the Republic. That Constitution had to be made 
effective. It had to be so interpreted and declared, its 
principles had to be so expounded that men would know 
that they were dealing, not with that Confederation 
which gasped and died on the threshold of the Conven- 
tion, but with a Nation. . . ." 

Then follows, in a number of carefully selected quo- 
tations from Marshall — who sat in eleven hundred cases 
through over a third of a century — the outlines of a body 
of doctrine for Nationalism which could not in equal 
space be exceeded in American political literature. 



268 THE NEW POLITICS 

Another is Governor Woodrow Wilson. In his chap- 
ter on State Rights (Cambridge Modern History, vol. 7, 
United States, p. 414) he says, "It was the West that was- 
making a nation out of the old time federation of seaboard 
states. Webster was insisting upon the new uses and 
significance of the Constitution; Hayne was harking 
back to the old. . . . The national life had, in these later 
days, grown strong within it. . . . No Constitution can. 
ever be treated as a mere law or document; it must 
always be also a vehicle of life. Its own phrases must 
become, as it were, living tissue. It must grow and 
strengthen and subtly change with the growth and 
strength and change of the political body whose life 
it defines, and must in all but its explicit and manda- 
tory provisions with regard to powers and forms of 
action take its reading from the circumstances of the 
time." 

This broad, safe, conservative Nationalism is that 
which the nation has been working out for itself, and 
we find its exponents in all sections and in all parties. 
Since this is, after all, the fundamental question and point 
of view, here ought the old parties to be reorganized. 
The national party is unorganized and unnamed. Per- 
haps it is time for it to be named and organized. 

There is a fundamental line of cleavage here histori- 
cally and philosophically. 

In our policies there may be a hundred. In our poli- 
tics there may be only this one. It is that which sepa- 
rates by unbridgeable abysses the ground ideas of the 
two systems of thought — that of atomism and that of 
organic unity. 



THE NATIONAL PARTY 269 

The Declaration of Independence leaves out the ele- 
ment of reciprocity, outlines the philosophy of individual- 
ism, and is the foundation stone of the democracy of 
individualism. 

The Constitution, on the other hand, offers the founda- 
tion for a creed of the democracy of altruism. Enacted, 
as it were, for the express purpose of declaring ourselves 
one instead of thirteen nations, it uttered a new and sig- 
nificant note in the prevailing discords of anarchy when 
it declared its purposive mission "to promote the general 
welfare." If Gladstone's estimate is correct that this 
was the noblest document ever struck off at one time 
from the mind of man, it is also true that the Preamble 
contains one of the most benign and far-reaching ethical 
motives ever ascribed to a political document. Every 
one knows the onslaughts of the political ancestors of 
the American democracy on this precious instrument; 
how Jefferson said, after opposing it, it should be made 
over every nineteen years, and how Alexander Hamilton, 
in one of the most dramatic and brilliant struggles in the 
political annals of mankind, saved the Constitution at 
Poughkeepsie, blasted the last hope of individualism and 
the "particularists," and made anarchy forever impos- 
sible so long as the Constitution lasts; and saved this 
nation to the future in securing that instrument which 
was not only to be the perpetual guarantee of our liber- 
ties, but the assertion of our duties. 

Then and there was the fundamental issue defined 
between the two great political parties of the United 
States, and then and there were the broad lines of future 
conflict laid out. 



270 THE NEW POLITICS 

The struggle of the twentieth century will be between 
the parties of State Rights and of One Nation — of Indi- 
vidualism and Nationalism; between the party of self- 
interest and the party of the general welfare ; between the 
philosophy of the Declaration of Independence and the 
philosophy of that Declaration of Interdependence — the 
Constitution of the United States. 



CHAPTER VII 

TO SUM IT UP 

Behind every theory of government is a theory of life. 
The theories of life which stand opposed to each other 
at the beginning of this ominous century are the prin- 
ciple of individualism and the principle of association. 

Individualism offers a theory of society, but it is a 
wolfish one. 

Socialism offers a theory of society, but it is an im- 
practical one. 

Opportunism has no theory of society, no theory of 
life. It is sometimes good — it is sometimes bad. It is 
always uncertain. 

What we want is an idea. It must be fundamental, 
social, historical, ethical. Such an idea must be the foun- 
dation of the true democracy, and it will be founded on 
the theory of the brotherhood, not the step-brotherhood, 
of mankind. It must be an expression of the corporate 
reason and ethic; not the chaos of competing and unre- 
lated units. It must be an integral part of a whole theory 
of sound life and must not be "split in two with a 
hatchet." The atomist view of life, which conceives 
economics, politics, ethics, religion in isolated and unre- 
lated positions, bears about the same relation to modern 
intelligence as the older forms of phrenology bear to 
modern psychology, which represents the human mind 
as a unit and not so many faculties marked by cranial 
protuberances like so many hills of potatoes. 

271 



2^2 THE NEW POLITICS 

While we look forward ultimately to something wider 
than Nationalism, racial federation can only come 
through and be based on sound ethical Nationalism as 
the latter is based on sound and moral personal character. 
Anything like cosmopolitanism is too remote for dis- 
cussion here. But what we ought to have and what we 
might have is an ethical democracy in which the tenderer 
sentiments of the human heart may not wither and die, 
where a man may be honest and fair and still do business, 
and where men will not mangle and crush their brethren 
to acquire their property without fair return, and where 
the acquisitive instinct has not gone stark mad. To the 
true statesman the very idea of the separation of poli- 
tics and ethics must be an insanity. The fact that the 
brute instinct of self-interest is still the mainspring of 
human society shall occur to him as a colossal sin against 
God and man. Evermore, if we are human beings, we 
must return to the ethical problem, for human values are 
ethical and one human being will not dare face another 
human being in the universe without regard to the ethical 
motive. The universe is constituted this way. 

The fate of the Western Hemisphere — indeed of the 
world-experiment of democracy— hangs here. The faults 
of such democracy as we have known are the faults 
of the philosophy of life behind it — viz., individualism. 
The sinister elements dominating our institutions, and 
which give a foreboding aspect to our sky, are the hell 
brood of individualism, reduced in every case to the 
motives of piracy prevailing everywhere in our business 
world. Anarchy still prevails in our midst outside the 
reach of law; because we have separated ethics from 



TO SUM IT UP 273 

politics and economics — because we have separated 
morals from business and religion from life. 

There is no appeal from the verdict of history. 

In so far as motives of sociality have displaced those 
of selfish instinct we have seen the result in civilized 
society. If we are able to learn anything from the his- 
tory of our nation, it is that ours, of all human experi- 
ments, has shown by this time that human progress lies 
toward rational association and not toward that untram- 
meled strife called free competition ; away from anarchy 
and in the direction of nationally conceived and nationally 
coordinated law and order. The chance phrase of Plau- 
tus, "homo homini lupus/' describes such pure individual- 
ism as still exists in the world, and it is not time wasted 
for us to stop money-getting now and then long enough 
to ask ourselves whether it is more or less of it we 
want. 

So far we have survived and outgrown atomism, but 
we have not stated our national thesis nor formulated 
our national theories. We are, however, coming to the 
point that Jeffersonian atomism offers no rational basis for 
political association — for a theory of legislation, a theory 
of government, a theory of the state, or a theory of life. 

In proportion as we are abandoning individualism, a 
national idea is dawning upon us. Some one will confer 
upon the American people a lasting benefit when he dis- 
closes, at this line of cleavage, the clue of American 
political history and at the same time the key of Ameri- 
can political destiny. 

We are even beginning to get used to the idea of 
national self-government. This generation was born to 



274 THE NEW POLITICS 

it. Nationality is its birthright. It is becoming as easy 
for some of us to imagine a nation governing itself as a 
state governing itself, or a municipality governing itself. 
The idea is easy because we were born seeing the thing 
done. Once it was not so. Around this idea have been 
fought our fiercest political struggles and one of the 
bloodiest wars of the world. Out of these struggles has 
slowly grown the conviction that the very life of any 
true democracy, and its fitness to survive, is bound up 
in the proposition that the whole people is fit to govern, 
can govern, and does govern itself. Once government was. 
the bete noire of the American populace. We are begin- 
ning to find our national peril in lawlessness. Once the 
people shouted for individual liberty. But having nar- 
rowly escaped the danger of becoming enslaved through 
anarchy we are seeking more and more constitutional 
liberty. 

We have found out that certain things concern the 
whole American people; indeed, that everything Ameri- 
can concerns the whole American people. For these 
American concerns we are wanting strong government — 
national government. We want strong government be- 
cause that is the opposite of weak government. And 
weak government means a weak nation. And a weak 
nation means a weak people. And a weak people means 
weak people. We contend for strength, adequacy, 
national sovereignty over national relations and interests. 
We demand a government of all the people, by all the 
people, and for all the people. This we oppose to atom- 
ism, anarchy, confusion, and sectional strife. 

"The Divine Right of Kings," said Disraeli, "may have 



TO SUM IT UP 275 

been a plea for feeble tyrants, but the divine right of 
government is the keystone of human progress." 

I have contrasted, in barest suggestion, the basic ideas 
of the democracy of Individualism and of the democracy 
of Nationalism. 

I have indicated by a few concrete instances of ethical 
legislation wherein the American state, for a hundred 
and twenty years, has been encroaching upon the anarchy 
of individualism, and too slowly enlarging the area of 
the common good, by establishing the sphere of rational 
politics over brute instinct still predominant in our preda- 
tory regime. Other forces have made for anarchy per- 
haps as fast as we have gained headway, the unassimi- 
lated foreign element, and particularly the increasing 
power of lawless financialism, the enervations and degen- 
eracies of our young men and women, who have noth- 
ing to do but gratify their appetites and passions and 
study new means of wasting treasure created by exploited 
and unrequited toil. I have tried to show that under- 
lying such policies as have been a credit to the Constitu- 
tional party, to the nation, and to modern civilization, 
there are certain principles we have been working out, 
mostly in the dark, without intelligent plan or foresight 
largely — principles unrecognized, unstated, and unnamed, 
but which should be clearly stated, candidly discussed, 
and in good faith accepted or rejected as they have been 
seen to be valuable in practice. Fugitive acts, sporadic 
and opportunist legislation are too apt to result from 
demagogic appeal to the citizen who will sell his vote 
for his financial advantage, which almost all Americans, 



2j6 THE NEW POLITICS 

holding the business theory of the state affirm of their 
motives, and affirm without private shame or public re- 
buke. For the most part we are Republicans or Demo- 
crats because of our conception of our business interests; 
or one step further, for the hope of office; or further 
still, in the direction of pure Hedonism in politics, we 
sell our votes for money. If there is one thing worse, 
however, than selling ourselves, it is buying others; for 
the sake of our lawless aggrandizement, to acquire for 
a consideration, votes, legislatures, common councils, 
judges, and congressmen. How will the young American 
coming of age approach the franchise? Will he come 
with the sodden question in his heart, "Will my vote 
help my business?" "Shall I get office?" "How much 
can I get for my vote ?" I can imagine another kind of 
politician who will say, "I believe in reason instead of 
brute instinct; in law and order, not anarchy. I believe 
the American nation to be something far greater and 
more worthy than a 'business proposition.' I acknowl- 
edge an obligation for every privilege, a duty for every 
right, and bind myself to pay the future what I owe the 
past. I shall find a place for humane sentiment in busi- 
ness and for conscience in politics, on the theory that the 
categorical imperative rules the human constellations 
as completely as gravitation rules the stars." 

Here, again, emerges the fundamental question of the 
Politics of the Republic. Shall we govern more, or shall 
we govern less ? The individualists do not seem to have 
grasped the difference between these questions ; whether 
we shall be governed more or govern ourselves more. 



TO SUM IT UP 27*7 

Many seem also to think there is some difference in prin- 
ciple between local and national self-government. But 
this is comparatively harmless in comparison with those 
phases of the eighteenth century creed construing all 
government as an evil, and very little of it a necessary 
evil. The "Reds" of Paterson, the Black Hand of the East 
Side, and other gangs and organizations to whom we 
have extended our unintelligent hospitality all over this 
country, the Night Riders of the South, the bomb throw- 
ers of the West, the hoboes, and cutthroats, and rebaters, 
and stock gamblers; in short, all anarchists, above or 
below or outside the law ; all the law-breaking, law-defying 
brood of individualism hold fast to its amiable theories — 
that we must govern less and not more; that we must 
limit the sphere of law and order and not enlarge it, until 
the very quaking foundations of the Republic sound 
alarms for the increasing lawlessness of the nation. We 
have lost our respect for law and order as such, as a 
nation, and we are drifting back toward the instincts and 
principles of Confederation and state rights. We are 
losing the constitutional liberties we have won in the 
license we are willing to accord the lawless. The 
national problem is — more national self-government or 
less national self-government! 

Which do we want more of? 

This raises a concrete question. Shall we contract or 
enlarge the sphere of the state? Shall we go backward 
or forward? Shall we govern less or govern more? 
Shall we move in the direction of egoism or altruism? 
Satisfy our individual rights or discharge our duties to 
the human race ? Shall we repeal such ethical legislation 



278 THE NEW POLITICS 

as we have won, or shall we enact more similar legisla- 
tion for the "general welfare"? Any consistent egoistic 
individualism must say that to fulfill our destiny we must 
return to the purer "business theory of the state" — a 
policeman theory of the state — the state of primeval 
anarchy modified by a grudged protection of life and 
property — a state without reason or ethic — consequently 
without soul — and an environment where the human 
spirit will gorge on husks for swine. 

This is a vital question. The existence of this govern- 
ment and the permanence of our institutions depend on 
how our people answer this question. 

Shall we reduce ourselves to further individualism? 
Shall we provide no defense against external aggression, 
nor conduct foreign treaties, nor preserve internal peace 
and order? Shall we sublet the military and naval 
departments to the contractors who may also build the 
Panama Canal? Shall we take away the corner stone 
of family ties, duties, affections by failing to regulate 
the marriage contract? Shall we neglect our highways 
and extend no control over those who use them — or our 
bridges, ports or harbors, coast lights and surveys ? Shall 
we drop the postal system and provide no uniform sys- 
tem of weights and measures — abolish patent and copy- 
right laws? Shall we abolish quarantine, prohibit no 
nuisances, neglect public cleanliness, supervise no foods 
and medicines, abolish no adulterations, allow the impor- 
tation of contagious diseases, provide no maintenance for 
the poor, the idiotic, the insane, the helpless ? Shall our 
laws no longer shield infants by avoiding their contracts 
or protect their persons or property — or married women, 



TO SUM IT UP 279 

or persons of unsound mind? 1 Shall we allow no regu- 
lation of the employment of women or children? Shall 
we return to laissez faire, laissez alter, laissez passer — 
let-her-go and God help us — in other words, shall we 
govern less or govern more? That is the question. 

I venture to say that no political party will ever see 
the light of day again in this country which consistently 
supports individualism, its children, or its grandchildren. 
The salvation of our nation is bound up in the Con- 
stitutional party's being true to its philosophical founda- 
tions and its historic achievements, and in the completion 
of the program of Nationalism, for the hills around us 
are an encampment of the hosts of anarchy and the 
horsemen thereof. The American people must choose 
between government ownership, the confusions of indi- 
vidualism, and government control — in other words, 
between socialism, anarchy, and Nationalism. 

The old enemy is still in the saddle — individualism — 
nothing more, nothing less. 

But individualism takes no account and entertains no 
estimate of humanity. The democracy of individualism 
conceives a multitude of human units, each with a multi- 
tude of militant rights, with no common aim, no soli- 
darity, devoid of the idea of fraternity — unrelated, com- 
peting political and economic units. 

Such a democracy had been the lot which had fallen to 
the United States except for the gradual introduction of 
the methods and spirit of Nationalism. 

Let it be conceded that we can work better together 
for the same thing than against each other for the same 

1 Byles. 



280 THE NEW POLITICS 

thing. In the absence of 95,000,000 separate millen- 
niums in 95,000,000 individual hearts, Nationalism 
assumes political form and function and on its negative 
side sets up the principle of Government Control, while 
in its positive aspects it appears in the social, rational, 
ethical theory of the state, including a Christian theory 
of legislation. 

The late Professor Goldwin Smith once said that we 
ought never to glorify revolutions, that "statesmanship 
is the art of preventing them." This is the negative side 
of our problem. 

When Sir William Harcourt, in the House of Com- 
mons, said, "We are all socialists now," he meant that 
all intelligent countries are erecting ethical and altruistic 
barriers to human greed ; have differentiated between the 
creation and acquisition of wealth; have recognized that 
human evolution contains a principle higher than the 
reckless brute supremacy of the cunning and the strong; 
and that the unmistakable world movement is away from 
irresponsible conflict and toward rational association. 

If there is a question as to whether free institutions 
shall survive in this country, it has not arisen from the 
restraints legislation has laid upon the rebellious and 
greedy instincts of the "lord of himself in undisturbed 
delight," but in the sodden philosophy of the Revolution, 
whose tragedy has resulted at last in the American multi- 
billionaire. I have said we want a new Declaration of 
Independence of man as well as men ; of duties as well as 
rights; and it must declare the right of Nationalism to 
invade and restore and protect every sanctuary individ- 
ualism has violated. 



TO SUM IT UP 281 

Statesmanship just now is the art of preventing 
anarchy or socialism. Similia similibus curantur. The 
extension of ethical legislation is the only power that 
can put the anarchists out of business ; but if the country 
is to be saved from the disease of radical and revolu- 
tionary socialism it must be vaccinated. The hope of 
the survival of democratic institutions and civil liberty 
in the country is in the extension of the principle of 
association — of Nationalism — in the enactment of such 
ethical legislation as shall smash the "divine rights" of 
"barons" and all "corners" on necessities and make it 
little worth the while of any one man to acquire ten 
billion dollars or perhaps later own all the earth and most 
of heaven. 

One of the most splendid ethical generalizations of the 
human mind is that of the Scotsman whose forefathers 
went from Scotland to Konigsberg ostensibly for a job, 
but really, doubtless, that their son might become the 
creator of modern philosophy and German Idealism. 
Emmanuel Kant said, "That conduct is right which 
would work for good if it became universal." Politi- 
cally, it is the task of Nationalism to uphold this principle. 

Can we imagine the hog philosophy of modern com- 
mercialism alongside such a generalization? Can we 
imagine Napoleon, that insatiable maelstrom of Indi- 
vidualism, operating on the ethical plane laid down by 
Kant — or the child-murderers of Birmingham and Man- 
chester; or modern American billionaireism ? 

Individualism will creep barefoot in the snow or on 
its knees, like the pious kings of old, to hear the gospel 
of Manchester preached at the altar of Juggernaut, for 



2%2 THE NEW POLITICS 

it is the last refuge of despairing plutocracy. Who 
wants a status quo? He whom Emerson described as 
having no argument but possession. Who calls loudest 
for free competition? He who can circumvent or exceed 
free competition, the rebater and throat-cutter. Who 
wants to keep productive industry in a state of war? 
The man with the strongest arm and the heaviest artil- 
lery. Who wants to bolster the civilization which asks 
no questions but "who arrives first at the goal"? He 
w r ho has the largest handicap and the longest legs. There 
is not a man in either party who ever offered a bribe or 
took one, who ever bought or sold his vote, who ever 
won an election by intimidation, who is not a consistent 
individualist and who is not a logical believer in "the 
business theory of the state." No one but a consistent 
individualist ever deserted his post on the picket line or 
turned his back in battle; ever betrayed his country for 
gold or his Master for silver. 

Finally, to state this question answers it. 

If it is a question of motive without consideration of 
which the ethical element is inconceivable, is human wel- 
fare best served by the egoistic or altruistic motive? 

If it is a question of point of view, shall that be instinct 
or reason? 

If the antithesis is between two tendencies, does the 
"harmonious development of the human race" lie in the 
direction of license or liberty, chaos or order, anarchy or 
law? in forty-eight separate sovereignties or in one 
strong national self-government? 



EPILOGUE 

Twenty years ago the late Professor Sumner was 
writing in the North American Review on "The Absurd 
Attempt to Make the World Over." Professor Sumner 
enjoyed a place with the very large majority of the 
Anglo-Saxon race where he could congratulate his fellow 
beings if not that the atoms of the universe were fortu- 
nate in that they happened to stumble across those two 
great accidents — the world and man; at least, having 
stumbled upon them, the path of progress was up that 
Llind alley in which they could stumble some more. To 
set up a theory of navigation upon the abolition of 
rudders and the abrogation of astronomy was what 
those sons of Chaos, not Cosmos (as Carlyle might have 
called them), would set out to do in carrying our eight- 
eenth century a priori theories to logical conclusions. It 
is a commentary upon our intelligence — and it is tragic 
enough too — that we have so persistently refused to 
apply human intelligence to our own political affairs; 
that we have trusted to a policy of drift and have believed 
in the principle that we can make more progress blind- 
fold than with our eyes open. 

Now, this is a curious, I may say an extraordinary, 
development of irrationalism developed almost to a race 
characteristic. 

That we have been satisfied, for example, 99 99-100 
per cent of the human race, to apply more science to the 
production of a litter of pigs than to the matter of our 

own posterity; that we still allow the degenerate, the 

283 



284 THE NEW POLITICS 

habitually criminal, the idiotic, insane, and incurable 
to run at large and propagate their kind; that we, in 
America, allow Wall Street to' control and manipulate 
our finance to the extent that at any moment we may 
be plunged irresponsibly and without recourse into a 
state of financial panic — to be forever with our vast 
business interests at the mercy of a few financial pirates ; 
to have no business stability and no possibility of busi- 
ness stability ; these and a thousand and one Anglo-Saxon 
peculiarities are emphasizing our characteristically demo- 
cratic respect for established facts, first as an absurdity 
and then as a crime. There are all around us pathetic 
illustrations of the invincible perversity of our unin- 
telligence. 

So far as natural wealth is concerned — I mean the 
kind it has taken geologic ages for the good God to 
prepare — no people ever entered into such an inheritance 
as ours. And no people has ever behaved so badly 
with it. 

What have we done with it? We have been criminal 
wastrels. We have been complacent and unjust stewards. 
We have not only refused to take what belongs to us; 
we refused to keep what we had, and we have wasted 
what we had left. Result : The American financiers are 
rich and the American people are poor. 

We have been boasting that we are the richest nation 
on earth. What it means is that we have the richest 
multibillionaires on earth. We have been boasting of 
our inexhaustible resources, until there is only one inex- 
haustible resource left — the complacency of the Ameri- 
can people. 



EPILOGUE 285 

This is what lies at the botom of our laissez faire, 
laissez passer politics — this tragic optimism — this unin- 
telligent complacency of ours. It is based on a theory of 
life which has given us our politics and which is dis- 
tinctly eighteenth century in origin, scope, and spirit. 
It sprang from the movement of an age which gave us 
our personal liberty and failed to teach us what to do 
with it. That is why we do not know what to do with 
our national patrimony. 

The good Lord has made us joint trustees of the rich- 
est continent on earth and in our fat-witted optimism 
we have turned it over to the multibillionaire. We have 
given him the elemental resources of pur own national 
prosperity, and now we must pay and we have little to pay 
with. We have not only been criminal, we have been 
unintelligent. While we have been stripping our children 
to clothe the billionaire idol, we have been chanting our 
optimistic lies at his feet, until our optimism is the most 
pessimistic thing I know. 

It would seem that a race of beings as old as ours, 
and as ripe in experience, before this, might have found 
out that the intelligent framing of our political institu- 
tions and the rational administration of our affairs are 
better than that fantastic and whimsical method called 
laissez faire. 

No one who has ever given serious thought to human 
affairs can have failed in some measure to blanch before 
the awful preventable waste of human resources and of 
human aspiration and life. Nothing in all the wearying 
annals of the race is sadder than this world-waste — this 
preventable waste — this waste of resource — waste of 



286 THE NEW POLITICS 

life. The late Professor Ritchie once said : 'The history 
of progress is the record of the gradual diminution of 
waste." The history of progress has been all of this. 
But it has been more. It has been the intelligent use, 
and not abuse, of resource and life. It has been the con- 
servation of resource and life. 

This idea has found the beginning of a realization in 
one of the best consummations of the New Politics: in 
that most useful and most significant movement of mod- 
ern times known sometimes as the Conservation move- 
ment. It is the best illustration in the world of scientific 
government, "efficiency in management," constructive 
statecraft : this phase of the New Politics known as Con- 
servation. 

There are two or three or four men whose names 
have become closely connected with the movement (and 
to them such honor is due as is becoming to fairness and 
accuracy), who have very much more credit than they 
deserve. I am inclined to the view of Achilles, that 
"there were kings before Agamemnon." 

It is time for some one to recognize the thousands of 
trained scientists, especially in the government service 
at Washington, each man pursuing some undiscovered 
truth along the unt raveled pathway of superhuman labor, 
for the eternal good of mankind. For one man to flour- 
ish these trophies and pose as the father of conserva- 
tion is quite ridiculous. It is sufficient honor to have 
been the megaphone of a great movement. The other 
day Secretary Wilson was introducing me to some of 
the scientists of the Department of Agriculture. When 
I ventured to speak appreciatively of his work he waved 



EPILOGUE 287 

his hand toward them and said : "These are the men who 
must have the honor for the work of this Department. 
I am here to take the responsibility for its mistakes.' 5 
It was a handsome tribute by one who could afford to 
make it. 

Nearly a half century ago, Major J. W. Powell, taking 
his life in his hand (he had only one hand), made the 
famous passage of the Colorado River with his daunt- 
less companions. He spent years on the great American 
desert, and his labors, brought out first in his book on 
The Arid Lands, became the original impulse of the 
great American Conservation movement. Major Powell 
was the father of Conservation on this continent. 

Conservation is the concerted movement of several 
thousand scientists in the government service in Wash- 
ington whose work was set for them nearly a half 
century ago — more than by any other one man, by Major 
J. W. Powell. This work has been cumulative. The 
present Conservation propaganda would have been im- 
possible without the immense quantity of scientific data 
they have gathered by means of a vast amount of toil 
of which the American people little dream. With this 
great mass of material gradually closing into something 
like a unified and synthetic shape, it would be a poor 
and unintelligent legislator or administrator who would 
not make use of it — not but that we have had poor and 
unintelligent legislators and administrators. 

Thus our scientists are giving the world a new lesson 
in government. More than this, they are giving us a 
new lesson in Politics. I know of nothing like it in the 
history of mankind — like this unexpected substitute for 



288 THE NEW POLITICS 

the boss and the machine — like this body of doctrine 
which shall take the place of Jacobin egotisms, shrieked 
on our Fourth of July platforms and by our quadrennial 
spellbinders mouthing the tariff. 

Here is the work — here are the investigations — here 
are the scientific and irrefragable conclusions of some 
thousands of the most useful men in the world to-day — 
making a contribution to human civilization and to 
human progress which has never had its equal. They 
have essayed the colossal task of the habilitation of a 
continent. Their "absurd attempt" to make this half of 
the world over, which is still unmade, and which we in 
our folly have been making worse, is no less than the 
beginning of the saving of the continental domain, which 
is our national home, on terms that will keep it for pos- 
terity for thousands of years to come. 

Without this work, one hundred years would have 
seen this continent a wilderness, in respect to several of 
the elemental resources upon which national prosperity 
depends. 

Conservation is Scientific Government. It is the basis 
of a new Political Economy. It is the foundation of 
a New Politics. It is the logical development of the 
old Nationalism. It has already taught us some very 
sound lessons as to whether the political doctrine of 
haphazard is better than that of scientific prevision 
and precision ; as to whether the "absurd attempt to make 
the world over" is as absurd as its abandonment to 
anarchy and rapine. The fact is, we have been making 
the world over. What has been done by the atomist in 
the scramble of helter-skelter, the blind, unreasoning, and, 



EPILOGUE 289 

I may say, irrational strife, unguided and unchecked by 
rational constitutions and institutions, is not generally 
very much to the credit of the human race. But there 
have been those who have dreamed of making the world 
over and making it better. It is a dream as old as the 
aspirations of men; that this old earth of ours, hardly 
a spot of which has not been wet some time by blood or 
tears, shall some day become the home of a rational and 
happy race, when men will no longer slay to steal. Little 
by little the world itself, for what man has done to it, 
is becoming a better place to live in ; and because of this 
very foresight and reason and discipline of man, people 
have become kinder; that is to say, good will has taken 
the place of enmity, and cooperative effort has supplanted 
the principle of strife, and civilized and intelligent and 
scientific government has to a degree supplanted that 
weird and fantastic old-world gospel of whimsicality 
and drift, and we are only beginning to dare to dream 
how much we can do for ourselves and posterity through 
reason and ethics embodied in our political institutions — 
through a Constitution framed and construed to "pro- 
mote the general welfare." 

Strange paradox! The scientist has become dreamer. 
The scientist has dared to dream of the rational order- 
ing of a hemisphere — a half world made over. Some 
time since, Professor Tyndall gave an epoch-making 
lecture on "The Scientific Use of the Imagination." 
Some one, doubtless, is about to write on the imaginative 
use of science — let us say applied science — for science 
like all other good angels must come down out of the 
clouds to bless the earth. 



2 9 o THE NEW POLITICS 

This matter of making the world over is a case in the 
direction at least of the desertion of laissez faire and 
the application of intelligence to human government. It 
is the resurrection of a patriotism which understands 
that there is a spirit in politics higher than a partisan 
spirit. The further we can get away from that con- 
temptible motive which rules American politics with 
scarcely shadow of turning — "my party, right or wrong" 
— and the further we can advance the principle that 
human affairs can and ought and must be ordered with 
scientific foresight, and with naked justice for the com- 
mon good, the better basis we shall develop for a just 
and rational government. It involves reexamination of 
our politics and its policies — of our whole theory of life. 
Is this revolutionary? Perhaps it is. The introduction 
of rational patriotism into American politics would turn 
our world upside down at once. 

But perhaps it would be right side up at last. 

It cannot be denied that we need some fundamental 
change. 

We live in a sordid and spiritless age. Frankly, it 
is a disappointment. We are not justifying our inherit- 
ance, our opportunities or ourselves. We are produc- 
ing no great literature, nor art, nor philosophy. Our 
religion has lost its hold upon us. We are not producing 
great and noble men, like the creators and demigods of 
old. We later Americans have surpassed the world in 
nothing but in our speculators. We have found our aspira- 
tions in the skyscrapers. The register of our ideal is 
the cash register. This is our distinction. And we seem 
to be satisfied with it. This shall be our indistinctiom 



EPILOGUE 291 

So far the Western Hemisphere has produced no first- 
rate creative intellectual or spiritual genius. If it is 
destined some day to achieve something which can be 
placed alongside the great creations of the human mind, 
such as long ago did those "architects of cathedrals not 
made with hands," those "sculptors of the very substance 
of the soul," "those melodists who improvised the themes 
upon which subsequent centuries have written vari- 
ations," why should we not produce the architect who 
shall frame such plans and specifications of human asso- 
ciations as shall clear away every possible hindrance and 
raise every possible help to noble living and rational rela- 
tions among mankind ? 

That ethical democracy which (let us hope) is destined 
some day to create a congenial abode for mankind on 
this Western Hemisphere cannot be conceived apart from 
the life of that eternal and ever-blessed corner in the 
eastern Mediterranean where Greece and Palestine — 
East and West once found meeting — and where mind 
and spirit have so far reached their most perfect flower. 
Far to the North the Germans approached it a hundred 
years ago, then, becoming "Americanized," lapsed into 
materialism and commercialism again. Why has the 
world failed of what Socrates and Jesus might have 
expected of* it? Has it not been because the wan 
ghosts of inspiration have striven vainly in the whirl- 
ing maelstrom of self-interest? The immortal legacies 
of Greece and Palestine (which those would banish 
from the curricula of our youth who would live by 
greed alone) have been locked up in Chancery and 
are not available assets of the world to whom they 



292 THE NEW POLITICS 

were bequeathed — these our choicest bequests of mind 
and heart. 

We Americans have been content to import our litera- 
ture, buy our art, and do without philosophy. We have 
shot off on the perverse and irrational tangent of the 
miser's instinct. Our dollar-heaping instinct has gone 
mad. No honorable and worthy future lies in the land 
toward which we have turned our faces and are approach- 
ing with an automobile speed. Except in crass and 
boastful egoism we can hardly claim to be the flower 
of all ages if we have no great overwhelming, all-absorb- 
ing national aim and passion — if we are content, like a 
flock of sparrows, to flit aimlessly and twitter glibly, reck- 
ing nothing of the future, each picking his own seed, 
adding little to the instinct but that of the magpie. 

There was once a time when the world was young. 
As long before Jesus as Columbus lived before our day, 
a race of athletes dwelt by the blue ^Egean, in the world's 
spingtime ! Dawntime of the human mind — birthday of 
the human spirit ! We still linger lovingly among the 
broken ruins of Pheidias. We still listen to the interrupted 
accents of Demosthenes and Pericles. Still iEschylus, 
Sophocles, Euripides, ageless voices, sound in our ears. 
Still reason speaks to the modern mind, as if a Prome- 
theus which Socrates, Plato, Aristotle first unchained. 
Still Homer, the unsurpassed, leads us with his hosts in 
the banquet rooms and pathways of the gods. And we 
are sitting here across thirty centuries, old and gray and 
with shaking knees, shivering by the burnt embers on a 
hearth where there is no fire. The contemporary of 
Pericles could have met on the streets of Athens (not 



EPILOGUE 293 

as large as our Omaha) ^Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, 
Thucydides, Herodotus, Hippocrates and Democritus, 
Anaxagoras and Aristophanes, Pheidias and Socrates, 
and Pericles. 

Gladstone has somewhere said, "To pass from the 
study of Homer to the business of the world is to step 
out of a palace of enchantment into the cold gray light of 
a polar day." Step out of the street of Athens and across 
the courtyard of New York. Whom do you meet? You 
would meet captains of industry under the red flag 
and captains of finance flying a black one. These are 
our jewels. 

It is getting cold down here. There is no fire on our 
hearth. Is this Hesiod's Iron Age or his Golden Age, 
or is it the World's Old Age? 

The Yankee spirit may have evolved the flower of 
individualism, but it has not exhausted the fertilities 
of this Western Hemisphere. The modern city and 
Gehenna of Individualism may not be the last resource 
of humanity. 

No, the destiny of the Western Hemisphere lies in the 
direction of the extension and establishment of ethical 
Democracy — of the people and for the people — all the 
people; and away from the despotism of a financial 
syndicate of one per cent, by one per cent, and for one 
per cent. Just cause for hope lies in the fact that ninety- 
nine per cent of a great nation are stronger than one 
per cent in force and morale and ninety-nine per cent 
and God must win. 

The Democracy of the future will not be the democ- 
racy of Individualism. It will synthesize the Greek form. 



294 THE NEW POLITICS 

and Christian content. A true and satisfying theory of 
the state must be expanded extensively toward something 
like the Greek ideal and intensively toward the Christian 
motive — and motive power. To state this synthesis of 
Greek statics and Christian dynamics will be the supreme 
task of the future American Thinker. This man will 
come to us as Socrates came to Athens. He may leave, 
too, as Socrates left Athens. He will find among us 
the descendants of the Sophists — that opportunist prod- 
uct of democracy and demagogy — literary and intellec- 
tual tradesmen or prostitutes, in the pay of the interests 
or the parties they represent for hire, men who whether 
they be legal gentlemen or not are still hired attorneys 
in fact, retained to "strangle the rights of the present 
with the fictions of the past." He will find them clever 
to a degree, shrewd, superficial, plausible, fluent, and 
unprincipled, proclaiming for a consideration subversive 
doctrines and beguiling platitudes, shunting every for- 
ward movement to the side track of a counter-irritant. 
To such he will come — but to their dupes as to a field 
waiting for the husbandman. 

A cool, sane thinker, a ripe historian, and a man of 
faith, he will glean from the past those principles the 
world has tried, and its best have lived by, and its worst 
have failed, not having lived by, and to them he will 
weld another contribution, the world well knows is its 
best and has not tried. Then the Americas will make 
a new beginning in the history of mankind. 

The Americas should be the arena of something 
new and incomparable and should produce from her 
unexhausted soil a new type of men and of man. Per- 



EPILOGUE 295 

haps here will be worked out the new Universalism — 
the true Cosmopolitanism — for it is here the East meets 
the West. That was a beautiful and prophetic fancy of 
Alexander's which led him to marry a hundred Greek 
youth to a hundred Oriental maidens, but the true union 
of East and West will be at the nuptials of Greek mind 
and Oriental spirit — the Aryan form with the Semitic 
content — and will result in a new offspring of Hellenic 
Ideal and Christian motive. May these two streams meet 
in one on this Western Hemisphere of ours. Then may 
the future build by its banks. 

The attempt to make the world what it ought to be 
is not — to a few unfashionable people at least — as absurd 
as is the complacency of those optimaniacs who believe 
that "whatever is, is right," and who, therefore, worship 
the status quo. A few dreamy folk are beginning to feel 
that perhaps if the attempt to make the world over is 
absurd, it is wicked not at least to try and make it 
better than it is. If it is ever to be made over or even 
improved it will never be done by itself, but by the attempt 
of actual men and women through their rational fore- 
sight and will. 

As a matter of fact, man has been making the world 
over from the beginning of intelligence in men. We 
are what we are to-day better than what we- were some 
thousands of years ago because intelligent beings have 
made us and our conditions so. We are what we are 
worse than what we were for lack of intelligence applied 
to our own affairs. The role of intelligence has not been 
thought out, has not been given a chance in our institu- 
tions. There seems to be a destiny for human intelli- 



296 THE NEW POLITICS 

gence in American Politics. It is beginning the "attempt 
to make the world over," and the absurdity of not mak- 
ing the attempt is dawning upon us. 

Sir Philip Sidney wrote to his brother, "When you 
hear of a good war, go to it." Whoever to-day, endowed 
with that same naive and sweet militancy, finds himself 
bereft of other occupation might do well to remember 
that we still live in an age of wars and rumors of wars. 
If there must be war, and if man must struggle and test 
his limbs, let it be in the cause which when it wins shall, 
record "that war shall be no more." There is good fight- 
ing ahead and on a higher plane than on most former 
fields of strife; fighting of such dignity as shall nerve 
every arm that would draw the sword — fighting that 
shall wax fiercer with every decade of this century, and 
for how much longer does not matter to you and me so 
far as fighting purposes are concerned after we have laid 
down our arms. Not in our lifetime, surely, has such a 
bugle blown ; nor has so shrill a note, and so peremptory, 
awakened men from sleep as now sounds the call in 
this morn of new battle for the hosts of reason to line 
up against the hordes of plunder and caprice. Across 
the battlefield and in the mist we may hear their jangled 
voices as the first fury spake to the enchained Pro- 
metheus. 1 

We are the ministers of pain and fear, 

And disappointment and mistrust and hate, 

And clinging cries ; and as lean dogs pursue 

Thro' wood and lake some struck and sobbing fawn, 

We track all things that weep and bleed and live, 

When the Great King betrays them to our will. 

1 Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, Act i Scene i. 



EPILOGUE 297 

Do we not recognize the challenge? Do we not know 
the certain note of those voices of the progeny of Indi- 
vidualism? And do we not hear in the background of 
a chorus of tragedy, older than the tragedy of the 
Greeks, the plaint of those masses without footing on 
an unfriendly earth doomed to strive vainly as Sisyphus 
to keep those they love from famine and shame? Shall 
we pass by without championing this one unchanging 
cause — age-long and never won, but always winning — • 
which thrusts itself anew upon every generation; while 
chivalry arises each time, like the fabled bird from its own 
ashes, to strive again for the weak against the strong? 

Let the nameless and self-seeking herd heap together 
their dollars and other people's. Let them glut and be 
drunken. Let them rot and be forgot. But in the world 
still wanders the spirit older than Pindar: "Foras- 
much as man must die, wherefore should we sit vainly in 
the dark through a dull and nameless age and without 
lot in noble deeds?" 

There is a cause which may yet enlist men of belief, 
and create a new chivalry and a new crusade. It is the 
cause of the tired, the throttled, the thwarted, the en- 
chained. Name it what you like, in whatever form or 
disguise it may appear to any age, the irresponsible power 
of one man over another man is the antediluvian dragon 
desecrating our sacred liberties. That irresponsible 
power is enslaving the world to-day. Here it is in our 
midst in this, our boasted and alleged American democ- 
racy, which is not a democracy as long as it is run on 
the principle of free and unlimited competition between 
hawks and turtle doves. 



298 THE NEW POLITICS 

It is the twentieth century aspect of the immemorial 
instinct of prehensile man. 

The melancholy shore of the vast age behind us is 
strewn with the wrecks of nations that have gone to 
pieces on the promontories of Individualism, and others 
are floating like huge derelicts among the peoples of the 
present day. Greece could not survive Individualism. 
Rome could not survive Individualism. We cannot sur- 
vive Individualism. 

To refuse to accept the lessons of history is to pro- 
nounce judgment against our own sanity. History is a 
stern schoolmaster, but a good one, and to make over and 
over the same mistakes is to grind out our chance in a 
treadmill. It is with sorrow, I take it, that the German 
philosopher said, "Rulers, statesmen, and nations are 
wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching 
which experience offers in history. But what experience 
and history teach is this — that people and the govern- 
ments never have learned anything from history, or 
acted on principles deduced from it. The pallid shades 
of memory struggle in vain with the life and freedom 
of the present" (Hegel). 

Greece and Rome have played their parts in the great 
human drama, and we have read the pages which record 
their downfall. Our own history is not yet written, for 
it is not yet made, but the sober man can see familiar 
and sinister forces at work in our midst — the same self- 
indulgence in luxuries not the fruit of honest toil, the 
insane and inevitable degeneracies and corruptions, as 
when Jugurtha gained the Senate by bribery. Even 
Cicero attributed the prevailing corruption of the repub- 



EPILOGUE 299 

lie to the passions of Individualism. He tells us how all 
private affairs were decided by the private authority of 
those citizens made eminent and powerful by their private 
wealth. Long before Cicero, Aristotle bitterly com- 
plained that if the Greeks could only work together 
Greece could rule the world. But there came a day when 
the Greek historians were to be her tragedians, for in the 
Greek struggle between State Rights and Nationalism, 
Individualism prevailed. Read the melancholy record of 
Thucydides. He wrote that in Sparta and Athens the 
parties not in power each connived with the enemy in 
the other state, when "the tie of party was stronger than 
the tie of blood," and "The seal of faith became not 
the divine law but partnership in crime." They connived 
with the enemy for party purposes, as some came fear- 
fully near doing in our late war — sprung with treachery 
upon us in the Philippines. "An attitude of perfidious 
antagonism everywhere prevailed," continued Thucydi- 
des, "each man looked to his own safety," and "revolution 
gave birth to every form of wickedness." It was the des- 
tiny of Greece solely because of Individualism gone mad, 
to look upon a promised land it was destined never to 
inherit. And this was simply because public spirit and 
patriotism were reduced to cinders by the "Greek fire" 
of egoism, from which neither the insight nor the out- 
look of her individual classicism could save it. 

We have no right to expect more of atomism than that 
we, too, shall go to pieces, soon or late, if we do not 
abandon the fundamental errors which underlie our life 
theories. It is not an absurd mission — this mission of 
the new Chivalry and the new Crusade. It is not an 



3 oo THE NEW POLITICS 

absurd faith — this faith that we can and will make the 
world a better place to live in. The young men of 
America to-day are seeking a new Creed. It will be one 
which was partially phrased in a happy sentence of Dr. 
August Forel : "Let us not abandon the race to the fatal- 
ism of Allah; let us create it ourselves." 



H 253 82 



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